


Civilian

by windandthestars



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory Swap, Childhood Trama, F/M, News Night with MacKenzie McHale, Prompt Bracket Fic, See notes for warnings, Will McAvoy EP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:47:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21854749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windandthestars/pseuds/windandthestars
Summary: “What do you want from me?”“This.” He holds up the legal pad like maybe she isn’t understanding, but he’s the one that’s not understanding.“You didn’t come back from Iraq and take this job to better the world or whatever BS you fed Charlie.”“I didn’t come back to get some sort of revenge, Mac.”__Two years after Will went to Iraq he's back and Mac's not sure she's ready to pick up the pieces, or if she's ready to let him help.
Relationships: Will McAvoy/MacKenzie McHale
Comments: 22
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because I can’t break things just a little: warnings for alcohol abuse, smoking, anxiety/panic attacks, domestic violence, child abuse, trauma induced miscarriage (minor character), mention of (multiple) minor character deaths, maladaptive coping, vomit, and medical stuff/hospitalization. Also, the usual minor language.
> 
> Title from the song with the same name from Wye Oak (the live version from Amsterdam is a particular favorite).
> 
> Many thanks to all of you who have encouraged me to finish this in one way or another and have put up with my incessant need to start yet another backstory swap (I've almost finished them all. Promise.)

“Meeting with Leona?” She asks dropping into a chair with a sigh.

“Not today, kiddo.” Charlie turns from where he’d been leaning on the windowsill and she feels her stomach twist sharp with anxiety.

“Don said,” she knows she sounds a little anxious, but there’s no way to stop it, not when she knows this can’t be good, not when he’d asked her up here to a conference room with a wooden door and solid walls. He wanted the privacy for a reason.

“Elliot’s starting at ten o’clock.”

His smile is warm, pleased, so she relaxes a little, nods. “He’ll do great. He—”

“He appreciates you lobbying hard for him.”

“I know. He— Is he, is Don going,” she stops herself and lets Charlie answer before she’s buries him with half-asked questions.

“I didn’t offer. You have contractual approval—”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s,” she sighs and waves at a wall, at the artwork she doesn’t understand and shakes her head. “Is that really what you asked me up here to talk about?”

“I hired him an EP. I wanted to let you know before he starts in two weeks.”

“We’ve met?”

Charlie nods. It’s not a shrug with a nod. It’s not an offhand token of agreement. It’s— 

“Charlie?”

“He needs a job, Mac.”

She tries to swallow and coughs instead, fingers digging into the arms of her chair. “Charlie, you didn’t— you promised—”

“I asked you back to ACN, whatever contractual stipulations you wanted. You said you were miserable at CNN. You wanted to come home. You had a great show, good ratings.”

“None of that’s changed.”

“I want a show I can be proud of.”

“I—” She’d started to get up but she slumps back into her chair, gaze fixed on the wall in front of her.

“We’ve talked about you doing a show like that.”

“I try— Don.”

“Isn’t interested. I know. I thought about finding you a new EP.”

“I like Don. I like Don a lot.”

“Which is why Elliot’s getting the new EP.”

“But—”

“He wants this, just as much as I do. Do you know how hard that is to find?”

“I’m sorry.” She sniffs when Charlie trails off, pulling out the chair beside her.

“I’m not trying to upset you.”

“I know.” She pats her empty pockets before taking the tissue Charlie holds out. She hadn’t left her office expecting any of this. She’d figured Charlie wanted a word about Friday’s show, the Goldman Sachs segment, the three and a half minutes they’d wasted on the eruption in Iceland. She hadn’t expected to end up crying; she wasn’t a crier, especially not at work.

“You don’t have to work with him. He’ll be around but—”

“It won’t be like it was before.”

“Mac.” Charlie’s being patient with her, she knows that. He’s not doing it to be kind. He’s doing it because that’s what people did when they knew they were upsetting her. It’s the kind of mollycoddling her success has bought her. She was the charming, bright, successful one. She made a lot of people a lot of money and no one wanted to be the one to fuck that up. Charlie had known her long enough that he was less prone than most to these fits of concern, but he wasn’t immune.

“It’s fine.” She can’t quite muster a smile, not yet, surprises had a way of throwing her like that, but she hopes she looks convincing enough because she needs to leave. She needs to grab the cigarettes she’d left in her office and be down on the street before she started screaming and couldn’t stop.

“You don’t have to talk to him.”

“I just have to be able to sit in the same room as him.”

“Can you do that?”

“Can I?” It’s a ridiculous question given that Charlie knows she’s had to do far worse things than sit in the same room as the man whose life she’d single-handedly destroyed. “He’s OK with this?”

“I am.”

She jumps. She hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t heard the door click shut behind him but he’s standing there, she’s sure of it.

“It’s good to see you, Mac.” His voice is warm, soft in the same way she remembers it being, perfect and impossible to ignore.

“I should go.” She says it softly, to Charlie, turned away from the door. It’s impossible to hear footsteps on carpet as nice as this, but she knows he’ll move if she gives him a second. He’d know she wants to leave; he wouldn’t stand between her and the—

She freezes. She knows what it is before it slides into view, a pack of cigarettes, the lighter clicking more heavily against the polished wood as he sets it down.

“I thought you might need those.”

“Maybe I quit.”

He laughs, a sad chuckle, but it’s enough.

“I have a rundown meeting in twenty minutes.” It’s calm and flat, just as unaffected and steady as the hand that reaches out to grab the cigarettes and the lighter from the table, steady despite the way she’s shaking by the time she makes it down to the lobby.

*

There aren’t many good smoking spots, places where she can stand and blow through the better part of a pack without anyone noticing. During the day it isn’t much of an issue, but at night after a show, when people know to be looking for her it’s a bit of a gamble and so she’d made it through the week waiting until she gets home to light up, but tonight, tonight it’d been hard enough to make it onto the street.

“Fuck.” She checks the pocket on her blazer again then goes back to rummaging through her purse. She’d been playing with her lighter in her office before they’d gone on air and she must have forgotten to put it back. “Dammit.”

She hears the familiar rasping click and stops, fumbling for the cigarette she’d tucked behind her ear, lighting up without so much as a thanks as the flame flickers before her. She takes a drag and smiles fleetingly, shifting back into the shadows, leaning against the rough stone of the building not caring, for now, about the damage it could do to her clothes. She’d needed this, one cigarette and then another, part of a third before she realizes the helpful stranger hasn’t left.

“Did you need?” She holds out her pack, half empty even though she’d bought it that morning and listens to the responding chuckle, the familiar chuckle. 

”Will?” She peers around the corner to find him standing there, leaning into the same shadows she’d been hiding in.

“I wanted to make sure you were OK.”

“I’m fine. You have a show to get on the air.”

“I have a couple of minutes.”

“You have—”

“It’s all right to ask me to leave.” It was another patient reminder. She could ask him to leave. She could ask him to shut up. She didn’t have to see him, talk to him, listen to him, but none of that changed the fact that he was there, breathing, smiling, laughing.

“You should—”

“Do you want me to go?”

“I need another one.” She takes a final hard drag and lights another cigarette off the embers of the first before crushing the butt underfoot.

“Mac.”

“Don’t say my name like that.”

“MacKenzie.” It comes out firmer, more lukewarm. She doesn’t recoil from the sound of it the way she had been since he’d started on Monday. “Would you prefer to be left alone?”

“You have my lighter.”

He holds it out to her and she grabs it, tucking it into her pocket so quickly that it’s not until she pulls her hand away that she realizes it’s not hers. It’s cheap, plastic, too small to be hers.

“That’s not—”

“I started carrying them when I was overseas. I have a couple more.” He offers and she nods, shifting back half a step. It’s the most he’s said to her since he’d shown up three weeks ago. “Do you want me to go?”

“I— Is Don mad?”

“About tonight? No, he’s not upset.”

That hadn’t been what she’d meant; Don wasn’t the one upset about the broadcast. He’d probably gone home congratulating himself over how well she’d done saving the show from that abomination of a segment. He wasn’t upset about that, but he had seemed moodier lately, more volatile, although it was hard to tell. It was possible with her as jumpy as she was with Will around that she wasn’t being as charming and conciliatory as she usually was.

“Not,” she shakes her head. “Nevermind.”

“Northwestern? I heard some of what he had to say about that.” He reminds her gently. Everyone in the office that day had heard what he’d had to say. Don hadn’t exactly kept his voice down.

“He didn’t want me to do the panel, then he tried to insist on coaching me. Charlie thought the panel was a good idea, but.”

“That wasn’t your first time having an opinion.”

“It wasn’t my first panel. I didn’t say anything— I was polite and rational. It didn’t even make the campus paper.”

“It’s online.”

“The whole thing’s online. No one cares.”

“Except maybe Don. Is that what you’re worried about?”

She shrugs before fishing out another cigarette. “He’s been,” she shrugs again.

“He’s not happy you’re pushing back.”

“At what? I did the fucking segment last night didn’t I? And I saved both our asses tonight.”

“I’ve never seen someone look more shocked to hear the words ‘I’d rather not.’ I don’t think he was expecting that on Monday, or yesterday, or this afternoon.”

“He,” she stops to light the cigarette. She should slow down. She really ought to slow down, but this conversation wasn’t doing anything to calm her nerves. “I didn’t say no.”

“Maybe you should have.”

She scoffs at the idea tossing her head. She really should tell him where to shove it, tell him to leave her alone, but a disdainful grunt is the only sound she can make without risking a more overt display of emotion.

“You’re managing editor. You have the right—”

“Right.” She cuts him off, tucking the pack of cigarettes into her purse with an aggravated sigh.

“Do you have a car waiting?”

“Do you really think—?”

“That’s usually a sign the conversation’s over.” He misinterprets her half-finished question, gesturing at her bag, at the way she’s pulled it tight against her side, waiting. “Should I hail you a cab?”

“Yeah,” she exhales slowly, carefully stubbing out her cigarette so she can light it again when she gets home, “OK.”

*

“Are you decent?” 

“What?” She says into the phone again before pulling it away from her ear to stare blearily at the screen. “Charlie?”

“Are you dressed? Your super’s going to let us in.”

“Yes, No, Charlie.” She groans as she hears the lock to her apartment door click. “Fuck,” she groans again not bothering to disconnect the call before burrowing deeper into her bed.

“Go away.” She knows he’s there. He won’t say anything until he’s made a proper assessment of the situation, but Charlie had said us and there’s only one person that could be.

“Come on let’s get you out of bed.”

There’s no use protesting, so she doesn’t bother with the undignified grumbling. Clinging tighter to the bed, to her duvet, won’t do her any good either, but she can’t help that, the way she desperately clings to the remnants of sleep.

There’s nothing she can do to stop him from dragging her from the bed, he’s too good at ferreting out her handholds and pulling her free, but she’s never been able to convince herself to free herself from the mess of tangled sheets on her own accord. She’s hated mornings for so long, hated the sudden drop into consciousness, so when he tugs gently at the blanket she’s clinging to she whimpers and presses her face deeper into the pillow, whining, “Will.”

“I’ll start the shower.”

“I—”

“Charlie brought breakfast.” Firm and gentle. She’d never been able to argue with that. Whatever Charlie wanted he’d been smart to bring Will, that much was clear to all three of them because wherever Charlie wanted, he knew better than to try dealing with her before she’d had breakfast, before she’d had coffee.

The shower helps. It always helped, although right now she’s more pissed about that than she should be. She was more pissed than she should be about a lot of things, but she tended to be like that when she woke up still a little drunk, the oblivion of sleep still tempering what would’ve otherwise been a sob-fest starting with ‘the time mama fell down the backstairs’ and ending with ‘especially in Oklahoma.’

“Bacon or sausage?”

Will holds up a pair of wax paper wrapped sandwiches and she grabs at one blindly, locating first Charlie, then her coffee and, “where’d you put it?”

“Your coffee’s on the table.”

“Not the coffee.” She’s snappish and irritable enough that she can see Charlie’s eyebrows rise but she doesn’t care.

“The booze is where you left it.”

“It’s not.” She’s about to whirl around and snap at him when he steps past her, stopping in front of the bookcase in the corner to bend down and retrieve the bottle she must have left there.

“You’re still drunk.” It’s not an idle observation, but it’s not a judgement either. She turns away all the same though, stung hot with shame. He would’ve known she’d been drinking before he’d stepped through her door, he would’ve known last night that she’d been heading home to drink when he’d hailed her a cab. She only drank when she hated herself and there’d been plenty of self-loathing to go around last night, there’s no way he could have missed that.

“I’ll take it down before I leave if you want.”

She turns toward him to find the bottle perched not the shelf she kept it on, but on the top shelf.

“Take it down now.” She wants to sound angry but she can hear the way her voice cracks, unconvincing. Even in heels she isn’t tall enough to reach the top shelf, even with a bit of a jump she won’t be able to reach that far back on the shelf and he knows it, knows she wouldn’t dare drag a chair over and pull it down, not when she was liable to drop it, not while she was still drunk.

“When I leave.”

“Then you can go now. Both of you.” She knows she’s making a scene but she can’t stop herself, not when she’s hardly gotten any sleep, not when what little sleep she’s had had come because of the alcohol, had come with a price tag, had left her stomach roiling with emotion.

“Eat your sandwich.” It’s Charlie, somehow unphased despite the fact she knows her face must be a sticky snotty mess.

“I don’t want—”

“Mac.” He’s tired Will now, although she knows that’s just a ploy, the not quite disappointed one that really would prefer it if she sat down and shut up just for a second, just long enough for her brain to catch up with the rest of her.

“Fine.” She slumps next to Charlie on the couch, the only place to sit in the apartment, glaring at Will as he leans against the wall beside the fireplace making his way through his own breakfast.

“What the hell do you want?” She’s finished with her sandwich but Will’s only halfway through the first part of his, chewing carefully, carrying on a conversation with Charlie she’s almost managing to block out.

He holds out the other half and she leans forward to grab it with a glare. Since he’d started at ten she’d been too anxious to eat before the show and last night, sick with fury, she’d only eaten enough to get her through her workout. The alcohol she’d tempered more with water than with food, but that had come later, late enough almost to count as breakfast but even so she was hungry and he knew it.

He’d been smart to bring real food and not the healthy crap Charlie usually brought, but she hated that he was using it to shut her up. She doesn’t want to get used to him being here before they dropped whatever shit it was on her. If they weren’t going to leave until she heard them out she wanted to get it over with.

“What?”

He’s barely had time to wipe his hands on a napkin but Will stoops and pulls a file from the bag at his feet before dropping a couple of sheets onto the end table beside her.

“What’s this?”

“Draft copy. For your show. If you want it.”

“Not from Don.” She doesn’t need to hear the whispering of another stack of papers, this one thicker, double spaced with extra breaks between the paragraphs to know that.

It wasn’t from Don. One look at _In the infancy of mass communications, the Columbus and Magellan of broadcast journalism, William Paley and David Sarnoff, _was enough for her to know there would be no intern-crafted handwritten copy on double-lined paper for her to scribble on aimlessly. “You wrote this.”__

__“It’s a rough outline.”_ _

__“You wrote this.”_ _

__“I did.”_ _

__“Why?”_ _

__“I thought you might be interested.”_ _

__“Did Elliot quit on you?”_ _

__“No.”_ _

__“You don’t think he’s up for this?”_ _

__“Oh, I’m sure he would be, if I was interested in asking him.”_ _

__“He’s good—”_ _

__“Not as good as you.”_ _

__“If you think,” she pauses to shake the paper in his face as he crouches down, “I’m going on the air and—”_ _

__“I don’t.”_ _

__“You don’t what?” She lets the paper fall still as she draws her hand back._ _

__“I don’t expect you to have any interest in going on the air and saying anything like what I’ve suggested.”_ _

__“Then?”_ _

__“There’s a week left in my trial period at ten. Shred the copy you’re holding but hang on to the other one until the end of the day Friday. I’ll give you a lighter to burn it after that if you want.”_ _

__“So you’ll leave now?”_ _

__“I want to go over it with you a couple of times. Twice.” He continues, being specific because he knows she’s not agreeing to anything without a clear understanding of what he’s expecting. “And once with Charlie if he wants.”_ _

__“What if I said I was going back to bed?”_ _

__“Are you planning on coming in on Monday?”_ _

__“Is that why he’s here?” She turns furiously to Charlie who has the good grace to look like he’s not quite following what they’ve been saying._ _

__“I meant we could talk about it then.” Will cuts in before she can say anything else. “I thought you might want a couple of days after—”_ _

__“After what?” She snaps back._ _

__

__“It seems like you and Don might need a break.”_ _

__“Don went home last night, got drunk with Maggie, and,” she glares at Will. “He doesn’t give a fuck.”_ _

__“But you might.” Her glare darkens but that smile, that tiny knowing smile of his doesn’t falter. “But I think you do.”_ _

__“You don’t have the first idea—”_ _

__“All right. I don’t.” He holds out a hand, placating and she takes a breath._ _

__“I’m not getting on the air and saying—”_ _

__“So tell me what you’d rather—”_ _

__She rips the sheets down the middle and tosses them at him._ _

__“You don’t like the Columbus and Magellan reference?”_ _

__“Is this the fifteen hundreds?”_ _

__“What would you rather?”_ _

__“I want you to go.”_ _

__“I know.”_ _

__He offers her a smile, soft and fleeting, one that says he does know, that he knows exactly how much it’s killing her having him here, having to see him, hear him, feel the way he fills the space around her._ _

__“You want Don to move to ten o’clock.”_ _

__“I don’t think you and Don are the best fit. I think you’d both agree on that.”_ _

__“But you’re not willing to leave ACN.”_ _

__“I don’t have a lot of options right now.”_ _

__“But Charlie can’t give you the job you want because I have contractual approval and he can’t fire me without cause.”_ _

__“It’s nice to know you think so highly of our friendship.” Charlie chimes in blandly as Will protests._ _

__“Mac, no one’s trying to—”_ _

__“You are.”_ _

__“No,” he shakes his head. “I’ll stay at ten. Charlie can find you someone else.”_ _

__“What if I just want to go back to bed?”_ _

__“That’s fine.”_ _

__“So you’ll go?”_ _

__“Probably not.” Will shifts from his crouch to take a seat on the floor at her feet. “I want you to know what you’re passing up.”_ _

__“I have a pretty good idea—”_ _

__“Exactly what you’re passing up.”_ _

__“Fine.”_ _

__She knows what she’s agreeing to, the hours she’s going to have to spend with him sitting there. Going over copy with Will for something like this, for something that wasn’t yesterday’s weather or tomorrow’s new release meant looking over and considering, analyzing every single word. It also meant he’d brought several more copies, a box of pens, and his laptop._ _

__“I don’t have a printer.”_ _

__“There’s a print shop on 93rd.”_ _

__“You checked.” She waits for an answer but he only raises his eyebrows. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”_ _

__*_ _

__She makes it halfway through the first page before her attention starts lapsing, makes it a couple more lines before he notices._ _

__“How’s that?”_ _

__“It’s fine.”_ _

__“Mac.”_ _

__He slides the copy toward her and she slides it back a little harder, a little harsher than she needs to. “It’s fine.”_ _

__“Read it to me.”_ _

__“Read it yourself.” Testy and short she isn’t expecting him to actually do it, but he does, laying the words out beside one another, smoothly, with an ease she can’t, right now, begin to understand._ _

__“Incalculably.” She stops him with a quick shake of her head. “It isn’t. It,” she stops with a frustrated sigh._ _

__“Is there a gym in the basement?”_ _

__“What?” She’s been avoiding looking at him directly but she turns toward him now, brows furrowed as he props an elbow up on the couch cushion beside her._ _

__“Downstairs. Is there a gym in this building?”_ _

__“Yeah.”_ _

__“Go grab a run.”_ _

__“Will—”_ _

__“Those twenty minutes will save us hours.” He tells her plainly._ _

__She knows he’s right. It’s not as if she hasn’t noticed the panic clawing its way up the back of her throat, but she doesn’t want him here, alone, with her things, with the boxes that still ring every room in the apartment. He hasn’t asked, but she knows it’s going to be the first question out of his mouth when she leaves: how long. How long had she been living like this? Too long, Charlie would say and that would be enough, he wouldn’t need to be more specific. She’d been here the whole time she’d been back at ACN, the whole time he’d been overseas. The whole time she hadn’t touched a box or unpacked a single thing she hadn’t originally shoved in a suitcase._ _

__“Go for a run and we’ll finish when you’re done.”_ _

__*_ _

__Things are quieter when she gets back, in her head and in the apartment. Charlie’s gone, the barstool she usually kept in the kitchen to reach the cabinet over the fridge in his place. Will perched on the arm of the couch, laptop on his knee._ _

__“Put some jeans on,” he says when he hears her lingering in the hall, “I sent Charlie out for lunch. He’s going to be a while.”_ _

__A while turns out to be an accurate assessment. They’ve almost finished the first pass and have gone back to arguing over ‘incalculably’ again when she hears a key turn in the lock._ _

__“I don’t care. Immeasurably. Innumerably. Incalculably is too unpredictable.”_ _

__“Isn’t that the point?”_ _

__“We’re not talking about some cranky old man.”_ _

__“Darn.” Charlie cuts in from the kitchen looking much too pleased with himself. “You’re not talking about me.”_ _

__She ignores him, ignores the smile that flits across Will’s face._ _

__“I’m not saying incalculably.”_ _

__“Immeasurably.” Will strikes out the word and carefully replaces it. “You’re OK with joining the circus?”_ _

__“For the sake of the metaphor.” She shifts, letting one foot drop from the couch toward the floor so she can lean a bit to get a better view of the notes he’s making, the somewhat legible scribbles in the margin._ _

__“Will.” She protests as he continues with his list of credentials. “That’s not—”_ _

__“It’s a draft. It’s a list of suggestions. You’re burning it on Friday, all right?”_ _

__“Sure.” She frowns and draws her other knee up, surprised when he smiles again. “What’s so funny?”_ _

__“It’s nothing.” He shakes his head and then glances over at the way she’s frowning. “I’m a little surprised you’re still wearing Levi’s.”_ _

__“I’ve always worn Levi’s.”_ _

__“I know.”_ _

__Her dark wash jeans were all Made & Crafted. They were the ones she tended to wear out. They were the ones meant to impress the more discerning members of the public, the ones who would otherwise frown at wearing jeans to brunch or to the liquor store. They weren’t the classic Levi’s. Without the signature swirl on the back pockets there wasn’t anything especially identifiable about the jeans, even the tag lacked its usual red, but Will knew._ _

__He’d told her once that he liked her swagger, the Levi swagger he’d insisted on calling it and she wonders if that’s what had given it away. She knows he can tell she feels more comfortable in jeans, more at ease in the proper clothes than she ever could be in pajamas, even around Charlie. It was an odd sort of armor, she’d realized that years ago: the quality and specificity of her wardrobe giving her, at least, the illusion of control. She’d always needed that and she’s thankful, today, that he’d given that to her, that one small insistence, the small concession she’d had to make when he’d asked: listen._ _

__“They look nice.”_ _

__“I bought them for my birthday.” She isn’t sure she had, but she had bought a pair and that feels close enough to the truth not to bother clarifying. “Charlie and I went out for dinner and—”_ _

__“Mexican,” Charlie interrupts bustling in with a couple of large plates. “We went out for Mexican.”_ _

__“And I ordered one of every taco so you thought you’d go for a repeat performance?” He hands her a plate with a wink and she sighs. “I’m not agreeing to anything just because you know what kind of tacos I like.”_ _

__“I can’t imagine you would.” He assures her but he’s still smiling, still so sure she will._ _

__*_ _

__“Hey.” It’s the patent Will hello, like he’s used to finding her sitting on the floor of his office at ten past eleven on a Friday night when the rest of the newsroom looks like a ghost town and even Charlie has gone home._ _

__“Those the guys you were embedded with?” She asks reaching behind her to set the frame back on the window sill where she’d found it._ _

__“Some of them.” He shrugs on his coat and grabs the briefcase he’d left on his desk before the show. “I’ll see you home.”_ _

__She shrugs and then sighs when he doesn’t move; it hadn’t been a question._ _

__*_ _

__She doesn’t say anything in the cab or as they climb the stairs up to her apartment. She’d thought about telling him to go home, but when her hand had lingered on the door he’d offered to come up._ _

__“OK.” She tells him as he slides the chain on her door into place._ _

__“OK?”_ _

__“Yes, I’ll,” she steps out of her shoes and slips the rest of the way down the hall to the living room. “I’ll do the show.” She tosses him the legal pad she’s been toying with since they’d left the office. “But I want your terms up front.”_ _

__“Legal—”_ _

__“That’s not what—”_ _

__“Mac.”_ _

__“Bullet points are fine.”_ _

__“Mac.”_ _

__“I don’t like surprises.” She reminds him dully and he sighs._ _

__“Can I sit?”_ _

__‘No’ would be the answer she’d prefer, she’d wanted to do this at the office, but she gestures toward the couch and he sits settled back while she frowns at her bookcase stacked with boxes, except for the empty third shelf where her bottle of whiskey, still perched on the top shelf, usually sat._ _

__“You can change if you want.” He offers, pen poised over paper, but she ignores him. She’s not going anywhere near her pajamas until he’s gone, until she knows she won’t be the first one leaving._ _

__It doesn’t take him long, the scratching of pen on paper ending with one final underline before he holds the pad out toward where she’s leaning on the window sill watching him._ _

__Hours, dress code, approximate meeting times, vacation policy, she flips the page to make sure she hasn’t missed anything and then tosses it back at him. “I have a contract with the network.”_ _

__“Which I expect you to uphold.”_ _

__“And?”_ _

__“And nothing: show up, help draft the copy, read the copy on air, go home. What else were you expecting?”_ _

__“What do you want from me?”_ _

__“This.” He holds up the legal pad like maybe she isn’t understanding, but he’s the one that’s not understanding._ _

__“You didn’t come back from Iraq and take this job to better the world or whatever bullshit you fed Charlie.”_ _

__“I didn’t come back to get some sort of revenge, Mac.” He sounds a little pissed. She’s hit a nerve but she’s not sure if it’s the bullshit or the revenge that’s needling him. “ I have no interest in hurting you. I made that clear from the beginning.”_ _

__“Did you?” It’s a reflexive question, deflecting, but he’s too used to that, too used to her to say anything._ _

__“All I want is to do my job and for you to do yours. Can you handle that?”_ _

__“Did I not make myself clear when I said yes?”_ _

__“That’s not what I asked.”_ _

__“I think it is.”_ _

__“I spent two years sending emails I knew you wouldn’t read. I never asked you for anything. Why would I start now?”_ _

__That wasn’t exactly true, he had asked her time and again to let him know she’d gotten his emails. She’d read them all, although she’d never tell him that, although she’d never replied, but she’d always clicked ‘yes’ when the box had popped up asking her to send a read receipt. It wasn’t much, that one small request. She hadn’t been able to resist that tiny connection, the shock of pain she felt every time she’d seen his name pop up in her inbox._ _

__“I—”_ _

__“No.” He says firmly and she narrows her eyes. She can’t fault him for not wanting to hear her rehash the entire thing again, but the fact that it bothered him that much and— “I’d rather you didn’t—”_ _

__“You can’t tell me—”_ _

__“I want to move past that, Mac. We both got hurt. I think that’s penance enough.”_ _

__She knows there’s a part of him that believes that, but she also knows he’s not intending to pick up where they’d left off. There’s no way they could. She’d made sure of that. “Charlie made you come here the other day didn’t he? That wasn’t your idea.”_ _

__“He said, I don’t know, Mac,” Will sighs. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”_ _

__“Because he wanted you to know where I live so you could play white knight. Poor MacKenzie got upset, she can’t help herself, but you can help her home.”_ _

__“Mac, that’s not—”_ _

__“Oh please, I’ve known Charlie forever. One minute he’s treating me like his daughter, the next he’s treating me like the dog someone kept kicking at the pound.”_ _

__“That’s not—”_ _

__“That’s exactly how it is and you know it.”_ _

__“I don’t, but I’m not going to argue. Write up my terms and conditions and I’ll sign them on Monday before Don and I talk to HR. If there’s something else you want to talk about I’ll stay, otherwise I’m headed home.”_ _

__*_ _

__“You want this notarized?” He asks, looking up at her as he signs the last of the copies._ _

__“That depends.” She leans back against the cabinet behind her, watching the way he tucks his pen into the cup next to his monitor. “Do I need to?”_ _

__“I would hope not.” He seems to find the idea amusing, his eyes crinkling in the corners._ _

__“You have a rundown in twenty minutes.”_ _

__“I take it you’re not planning on attending?”_ _

__“I don’t want to listen to the staff whining.”_ _

__Whining wasn’t what she meant and he knew it. She didn’t want to deal with the questions, didn’t want to have to try and explain when she didn’t have a clue why they were doing this, why she’d agreed, but he’d been right; she wanted to do her job and she couldn’t do it shackled to Don._ _

__“I’ll need you at six.”_ _

__She nods, taking the stapled pages he hands her._ _

__“We can run a couple shows before—”_ _

__“No.” She turns at the door, lingering only long enough to meet his eye. “Run the draft by the staff. I’ll be there at six.”_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [A Moodboard](https://daylightbegins.tumblr.com/post/189760303385/i-she-keeps-hesitating-keeps-wanting-to-say) for those interested.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s just like yesterday, that’s what she keeps trying to tell herself. It’s just like yesterday and yesterday had been fine except yesterday hadn’t been fine, not before she’d gone on the air, not while she was sitting here, right here, trying to remember to breathe, the same way she had the day before and two days last week, and the week before that.

“You still seeing your guy?” Will’s waiting for her, sitting on the corner of her desk, legal pad and phone in hand.

“What?” She has to resist the urge to wipe at her face before she can check her hazy reflection in the glass behind her desk.

“Habib.” His voice turns smooth, melts into the one that says he cares and she reaches to straighten the stack of files on her desk.

“Yeah.” She knocks the stack askew seemingly by accident, buying time. “I have an appointment tomorrow. It’s not a big deal.”

“All right. Was there anything you wanted to go over before?”

“No, it’s fine. I need to get to hair and makeup. Did you,” she stops at the door, turning back, “remember to have someone send flowers—”

“May your new home be filled with laughter and love.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“Yeah. Good show.” He offers and she turns back, hesitating.

“I’ll see you out there.”

“I’ll be in your ear the entire time.”

“OK.” He’d meant it as a promise but she can’t go there, not now. “You didn’t send roses did you?”

“Succulent dish garden. You said something about their patio.”

“Yeah,” she smiles faintly, she had. “That’s perfect.”

*

 _I’m downstairs_ the text had said.

“Too early for three flights of stairs?” She asks him dryly as she slips into the cab he’d hailed.

“I didn’t want to intrude.” He offers her a smile, countering the way she can’t stop scowling despite the fact he’d brought her coffee from the place around the corner, the place around the corner that usually had a line out the door this time of morning.

She sips at the coffee, picks at the cup sleeve her eyes on the air freshener swinging from the rearview mirror, and keeps her mouth shut. The cabbie’s chatting up Will, soccer not baseball, which she’s thankful for because she won’t have to jump in and save him.

She’s not good company at this time of morning, particularly not today, not before she’s finished her second cup of coffee, not after a cab ride so short she’s standing on the sidewalk confused before she realizes— 

“Wait.” She turns back toward the street, toward their cab that’s already pulled away from the curb. “I thought— what the hell are we doing here?”

Work. She’d thought he’d wanted to talk about work, about whatever the hell he thought was going on when he wasn’t around but she’d clearly been wrong about that.

“It’s in your calendar, the one for the editorial staff: _JH 9am_ every Wednesday.”

“You didn’t want to intrude.” She runs a hand over her face, breathes in carefully. “The fuck you didn’t.”

“I’m not,” he looks genuinely confused. “Last night after the show when I offered— I thought— I know you hate asking, talking about, I thought you might want someone with you. I can go if that’s—”

“No,” she sighs. He wasn’t wrong about that. Even if she shouldn’t, she hated the medication, hated asking for it. He’d always understood that, always been patient in helping her find the words. “It’s not— It’s— I can’t just walk in there.”

“That’s generally what you do when you have an appointment: you walk in there.” He reminds her trying for some levity, but she ignores that, stomach aching with a suppressed nervousness that isn’t getting any better the longer they stand here.

“I can’t,” she sighs and presses her eyes shut for a moment. “You can’t say anything to Charlie.”

“You haven’t—”

“Will.” She bites her lip, keeps her voice down. It won’t do any good to make a scene in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Promise.” He says bluntly before softening. “You haven’t been going have you?”

“Not exact— No.” It makes her skin crawl knowing what he must be thinking, knowing she’s been lying to Charlie because keeping an appointment wasn’t, technically, the same as going to the appointment, but it’d been the best she could do, the one thing she’d had to do to meet Charlie’s sole stipulation upon hiring her. It wasn’t in her contract, he wouldn’t do that to her, but he’d made it clear that he’d cared, that he still cared when he asked her from time to time how things were going.

“Is there someone else you’d rather?” He asks and it takes her a moment to catch up, another psychiatrist, another therapist. There wasn’t anyone. She couldn’t imagine anyone else, having to explain again, to rehash everything again. No, she’d rather not.

“No, I—”

“If you’re not—”

She shakes her head. She knows he’ll live with her hyperventilating before every show if he has to; he won’t push her. He’d never pushed her. He’s the reason she’d started seeing Jack in the first place, a gentle suggestion he’d been patient enough to offer only once.

“My prescription ran out a while ago and I—” 

She shrugs and he makes the tiny grunt she’s learning means he’s upset with himself for leaving her to her own devices but he doesn’t comment on that. “How long ago was—”

“Two years, roughly. I couldn’t—” She shakes her head and doesn’t finish. She’s not getting into that here. “I thought— and then I ran out and I couldn’t.”

She looks at him, gaze flickering, waiting for some sort of judgement, but he doesn’t look surprised, or angry, or confused. She looks at him and he gestures toward the door.

“Should we go in and do something about that?”

*

“Koch Industries.” Will tosses her the name as she’s slipping back into her heels after the show.

“What about it?”

“There’s a tie between the Koch brothers and the Tea Party.”

“You’re sure?”

“AFP, Americans For Prosperity, founded by the Kochs, it bankrolls Tea Party events.”

“You want to put that on the air.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“You think it’s a good idea?”

“I do.” He considers her as she slips the clasp of her necklace back toward the nape of her neck. “You were the one who suggested we go after the Tea Party.”

“So, Charlie was the one who sent me the Utah polling data then.” She shakes her head. She’d assumed as much but she hadn’t been sure, had no way of being sure until now.

“The what?” Will stops to lower his eyebrows at her.

“The Utah Senate nomination. It was May, this past May. Four months ago. I came in the next morning and told you if we were going to do things your way we’d better start covering the Tea Party.”

“That’s what started this?”

“Charlie faxing me the Utah polling data? Yeah.”

“Wait. He what?”

She almost laughs at his confusion. “Jim never told you.”

“There’s a whole segment of this story I’m missing isn’t there?”

She shrugs enjoying how confused he looks, the soft scowl, the amusement lighting up his eyes because he knows she’s enjoying herself, stringing him along instead clarifying things in one go.

“After that first weekend you told Jim to buy me a printer.”

“I did and he did.”

Will slips into a chair, leans back to watch her fuss with her hair in the dark glass behind her desk. Georgie hadn’t been around after the show to pin her curls up so they’re hanging loose, rustling against her bare shoulders, her blazer still hanging on the hook by the door.

“He bought one of those monstrous things, the combo printer, fax, whatever. He thought it’d be easier to send you stuff that way, if I could make my own copies, scan my notes, that sort of thing. He hooked it all up, called Verizon, left me a post-it with the fax number. I asked him not to say anything to you.”

“You were testing him.”

She shrugs. “He passed.”

“That’s the important thing?”

“Isn’t it?”

Will sighs. “You can trust him.”

“I know that.”

“Now.”

“Yeah.” She says although she knows that’s what’s bugging him, the fact that she hadn’t just trusted Jim, that she didn’t just trust people, that she could know their favorite foods, their spouse’s birthday, their kids’ names, send them flowers congratulating them on their promotion, their new house, and still not trust them with anything but the most cursory information. 

Will trusted Jim. In his head that was more than enough of a reason for her to trust him, but maybe that had been the problem this time. Loyalty born of a shared experience was powerful; she’d learned that at a young age. Will was a sucker for loyalty but he had no idea how twisted and tangled it could become, and she’d had no idea at the time where Jim had stood in the middle of it all.

Will sighs, a little disappointed she thinks, although he isn’t letting it show. “You’re OK with this, with going after the Kochs? I know you have friends—”

“They’re not exactly friends.” She reminds him flatly knowing there wasn’t anyone in her life barring Sloan he might consider for that distinction.

“You know people. You know people who are going to get pissed off. Really pissed off.”

“I know.”

He doesn’t believe her. She shouldn’t be this calm. She isn’t, not as much as she seems, but she isn’t worried either. Whatever damage they’re about to do, half of it’s been done already. 

“We’ll lay off after the election.”

He shrugs still waiting for her to say something, say something like what he’s expecting to hear but she doesn’t have anything else to say.

“Don’t do this for me, Mac.”

She laughs a little at that, at the thought that she might, because she should even if he doesn’t think so. Even if she would if she thought she could lay it all at his feet when she stops long enough to realize the enormity of what she’d agreed to. “It’ll come back on you.”

“And on you.” He reminds her gently, but she shakes her head.

“Not if Leona agrees.”

“There’s no way she’ll be happy about this.”

“It’s an election year. She’s playing both sides of the fence.”

“I don’t think,” he turns, still watching her as she stops to slide her blazer on, do up the top button before perching on the edge of the low bookcase beside the door.

“We stop after the election and the Tea Party and Koch Brothers are yours. You’re happy. Leona’s happy.”

“You asked her. How the hell did you know to ask her?”

She shrugs, waits while he tries to figure it out but there’s not enough for him to go on. “Charlie talked to you and Jim before he invited you to my place. You both knew Charlie was pissed about the frequency at which my phone disappears into a bottomless pit. That’s why Jim bought the fancy printer. Charlie’s some sort of Don Quixote god figure to you, and Jim’s— I don’t know what happened overseas, but he worships at the altar of Will McAvoy. The three of you were up to something.”

“But you said yes.”

“Half an hour before your deadline passed.”

“After you called Leona.”

“After Charlie went home.” She corrects, hooking her fingers around the top of the bookcase so she can lean forward a bit. “He would’ve realized I’d talked to her. It would’ve taken him sixty seconds to realize I called Leona the second I saw the two of you make it out onto the street in front of my building that Saturday.”

“So this whole time—”

“I’ve been waiting.”

“How?”

“I asked Leona what Charlie had been complaining about, asked her how she felt about it showing up on her air. She thought an entire segment on the state of the gourmet cheese market might be overkill, but she wasn’t opposed to Tea Party coverage.”

“As long as it stops.”

“You make that sound like it’s a suggestion.”

“Because it is.”

“It’s not.”

“Mac.”

“Take it or leave it. I need to head home.”

“All right.” She can tell he’s pissed, can tell there’s a lot more he wants to say, but she isn’t about to argue with him and he knows that. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

*

It’s the Friday after the midterms and she’s sitting in a bar, not at the bar, but she is there, with Will and Sloan and a couple of the others, and a glass of soda water and a lemon wedge because at least it looks like she might be drinking. She doesn’t really need the pretense, Will certainly hadn’t bothered, but she’s here after enough grumbling that she wants to look like she’s making an effort. 

She’d bailed on Tuesday, turning down the invitation before they’d gone on the air, so she knows she’s going to have to stick this out, even if the karaoke’s questionable and Jim’s feeling inquisitive.

“She doesn’t sound so bad.” Jim leans over to tell her and she raises her eyebrows waiting for clarification. “The karaoke. You keep wincing. She’s pretty good.”

“It’s the wrong key and she’s sharp.”

Jim frowns at her, eyes narrowing a bit as he stops to listen. “Maybe. Yes. That’s probably an accurate assessment.”

“It’s definitely an accurate assessment.”

“You sound pretty confident about that.”

“I’ve been told I have a good ear.”

“Do you sing? Play?” He suggests when she shakes her head and she laughs lightly at the thought. She did play a little, if lessons years ago from an eight year old could ever amount to anything. She had a guitar, a gift somewhat more recently from Will, but it wasn’t something she was comfortable with outside the confines of Bo’s garage studio.

“Charlie’s grandson plays a bit if you’re looking for someone to jam with.”

“No,” Jim offers her a smile. “Just curious. I’ve been here over six months and I know you like breakfast sandwiches, ceasar salads, and coral lipstick.”

“I spend two mornings a week at the gym kickboxing with Sloan.” She reminds him. He’s not trying to imply that she’s antisocial, she knows that, but he’s been around long enough now to realize that she wasn’t particularly big on sharing, even if she was always interested in talking about whatever he happened to be interested in.

“You collect old band tees, your phone falls into a black hole every night when you leave the studio, you buy Will packs of cinnamon gum even though he hates the stuff, but what do you do? What do you like? Do you go to the movies on the weekend? Watch HGTV?”

“You’ve seen my apartment.”

“So you don’t watch HGTV.”

“I don’t. Although I think you might. You sound a bit disappointed.”

“No,” he considers for a moment, sipping his drink, “I guess I was hoping there was something. Half the time I can’t tell if you and Will enjoy driving each other crazy or if you just drive each other crazy, but I really enjoy working for you and you seem like a really great person so I was hoping there was something, you know outside of work, that made you happy.”

“I really do like kickboxing.” She offers and he smiles at that, at her insistence and then turns toward Will when he laughs at something Charlie had said.

*

She spots Will making his way over before he notices that she has, so she’s laughing at something Nina’s said, really leaning into it when he interrupts, trying to drag her away.

“She’s a gossip columnist.” He hisses when they’re far enough away that Nina can’t hear him.

“I know.” Mac shakes her head with a grin. “She thinks I’m on some sort of mission. A mission to civilize. It’s ridiculous.”

“You didn’t tell her that did you?”

“No, of course not. Charlie certainly is anyway. Did you actually need something or are you hoping she’ll forget I exist?”

“She’s written—”

“I’ve read what she’s written. I’ve read what she’s written about me. It’s not particularly flattering.”

“But you’re still making friends.”

“I make friends with everyone.” It’s a dry comment, a little agitated as she reaches for another flute of champagne. “That’s my M.O. isn’t it?”

“Not everyone has to like you.”

“Not everyone does, especially now that you’re back.” She reminds him. “TMZ thinks we’re dating on the down low and Access Hollywood won’t stop calling Georgie asking for an interview like I’m stupid enough to spill everything to my hairstylist.”

“Georgie signed a—”

“I know that. She knows that. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“You worry too much.” She pauses to smile and wave at a couple of people coming in and he lets out a long exhale.

“How many of those have you had?”

“One,” she says with a sickly sweet smile as Jim passes by, “and if you’re going to keep being a dick we’re moving this to my office.”

“I’m sorry.” The sigh is back, except this time it’s clearly apologetic. “I’m not trying to be— I do worry too much, about you.”

“Ha. Ha.” She frowns at him, but he really does look sorry, really does look like he means it.

“I ask a lot of you. Sometimes I worry you won’t tell me if you aren’t coping. You certainly—”

“Will.” She’s a little exasperated, but mostly she just hates the fact that he worries, worries about _her_ , because he shouldn’t be here, not now, not with her, but she can’t seem to get him to go far enough for long enough to remember that. “Don’t worry about Nina.”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t look particularly convinced, but he nods along with her. “I’ll let you get back to the party, just—”

“I’m always careful.”

“I know.”

*

It’s not the first tabloid story. It’s not the first tabloid story about him, that had been about Karen, the so called rampant affair he’d been carrying on, like she hadn’t known about it, like he hadn’t told her about it when it’d started overseas, when he’d broken off the flirtation the week he’d started at ACN. He’d been upset about the story, a little confused by how nonplussed she was, by how nonplussed she always was about the tabloid stories.

This one though has rattled her a bit. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t anywhere near true, but the photo was damning if you were inclined to believe the headline: News Night Anchor and EP on the Outs Again. She knows exactly where it’d been taken, when it’d been taken. She and Will had been leaving the Starbucks around the corner from the office on Thursday afternoon and she’d given in to his teasing and let out a couple of exasperated statements, complete with sweeping gestures, one of which had been caught by the photographer. She hadn’t been mad, but she looked like she was. There weren’t many details, not exactly a draw for the magazine’s usual clientele, but it made it all the more damning to anyone who knew her well enough to fill in the blanks.

She tosses the tabloid into his lap and presses a hand to her forehead. “I fuck everything up.”

“Mac.”

“Don’t,” she sighs, but when she drops her hand back to her side and looks at him he looks wholly unconvinced.

“I literally fucked—”

“This isn’t about that.”

“For four—”

“You didn’t do that to hurt me.” 

She hates how sure he sounds, how right he is. Once would’ve been enough to hurt him. That was all she’d planned on, but she’d kept going back. She’d done the one thing she knew would hurt him, the one thing that might push him away, and then she’d gone back again and again because she hadn’t seen a point in stopping.

“I fucked that up.” She gestures toward the magazine and he sighs.

“I shouldn’t have goaded you.”

“Don’t make excuses.”

“That’s not an excuse, that’s a fact. Negative emotions don’t exist in the public sphere.”

“So I’m an ice queen now?”

“You know that’s not what I meant. You’re always so careful. I should’ve known better.”

“Maybe you did.” She doesn’t mean to leave the words dripping with venom but she must have given the look on his face when they slip from her mouth.

“You don’t honestly think I came back to spite you.” 

“No.” She shakes her head. He’d never been particularly patient with his anger, it bubbled up and fizzled out in pretty rapid succession, she’d seen enough of that in recent days to know that hadn’t changed.

“Or in spite of you.” He tacks on and she hesitates, lingers over another ‘no’ because she doesn’t want to lie to him, not now.

She shrugs. “You needed—”

“No, MacKenzie.”

“You did.”

“I needed a job, but not that badly.”

“Charlie—”

“Doesn’t make my choices for me. He can ask but he can’t tell me what to do.”

“I—” She keeps hesitating, keeps wanting to say, ‘I know you came back for me’, but ‘why’ rings louder in her ears, ‘it can’t be’ even more so.

“It’s all right.” He reaches and his fingers brush the back of her hand. “I’ve got another lighter if you want to burn the thing. I don’t think one copy’s going to make a dent in the shit show, but it’s worth a shot.”

“No. It’s all right.” She shakes her head, pulls her hand away. “Was there something specific you wanted to work on? I promised Sloan I’d meet her for lunch when she gets off the air, but I’m free until then.”

*

“Have you seen this?”

She looks at him and then over at Charlie who looks totally unphased despite the fact they’re all here at eleven on a Saturday at Will’s insistence.

“It’s a good article.”

“It’s,” he stops and takes a breath. “How many people are going to read the article? How many of the millions of people who see the cover are going to stop and read the article?”

“That’s not really—”

“That’s not really what? Your problem?”

“Will.”

“Because I really hope that’s not what you were about to say.”

“It’s the same interview—”

“I don’t give a fuck about the interview.” Will tosses the magazine onto his desk. “They’d have a hell of a time misquoting you. The whole fucking world knows that.”

“You’re upset about the photos.”

“You posed for those.”

“And a lot of other photos. It took all afternoon.” She reminds him a little sharply, stung by how betrayed he sounds, like he hadn’t agreed to let her do the shoot, like she hadn’t been doing what she’d been told to do. “It’s the same thing every year. You knew—”

“I didn’t know it would be like that.”

“Neither did I.” She spits back looking to Charlie for help, but he seems content to let the two of them hash it out for now. 

“Do you really think?” She stops herself, shaking her head to stop the words from tumbling out. “I didn’t have editorial discretion.”

“I know that.” That pisses him off, she can see that, like she was supposed to have done something about that. 

“You could have had PR send press photos.”

“I—” He stares at her. “I could have? You’re OK with people seeing you like this, thinking of you like this?”

“They already do, Will.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m a woman in the public eye. I have to be careful what aisle I stop in at Duane Reade so if some loser with a cellphone decides to snap a couple of photos it doesn’t look like I’m buying condoms or pregnancy tests or god forbid whatever the hell else.”

“That’s—”

“Do you know how many sexist comments I get in a week, no? Neither do I because Neal screens all the comments on the website and I’m using the email address of a woman who retired from AWM ten years ago because the one with my name, that one’s for HR. My agent’s stopped accepting fanmail on my behalf because half of it’s disgusting, so excuse me if I do one interview a year where I get to look like a real human being and not some made up media darling and forgive me if it plays into someone’s sick twisted fantasies because frankly I don’t give a fuck.”

“All right.” Charlie cuts in before Will can say anything, before she has a chance to draw enough air into her lungs to stop her head from spinning. “It’s done. Whatever we might think, it’s done. We’re going to have to live with that. Next time, Mac, clear the shoot with Will, and Will try to appreciate the fact you’re about to get a ratings bump due to the fact that her face is plastered all over newstands. They may not be tuning in for the news, but that’s what they’re going to get. Make it count.”

*

They’ve all gone home. The newsroom’s empty except for a few of Don’s stragglers, but she’s still standing there, standing in the spot she’d occupied since Will had slung an arm across her shoulder with a quietly whispered “Happy Valentine’s Day”. He’s still here too, somewhere, waiting for her she assumes because he’d had his chance to leave when he’d stepped out earlier and he’s still here.

“Hey.” He’s at her elbow, still and quiet, waiting.

“Hi.” She swallows, teeth wrapped around her bottom lip.

“I’m sorry. That was a lot.”

“It was,” nice, she thinks, but the word gets stuck somewhere and she lets it go. “You really hate that that’s the best you can do, don’t you?”

She doesn’t know what makes her ask. The raw honesty should terrify her, because she’s been letting him close, letting him closer than she should. Tonight had been no exception.

“Would you mind if I saw you home, walked you upstairs?”

“That’s not going to stop me from doing something stupid.” She reminds him like the fact he’s worried about her, has always worried about her, wasn’t one of the things that made it so hard to push him away, made it easier for her to do the things that scared him so much.

“I know.” He sighs and lays his hand on her arm. “God, I wish it could.”

“I know. You told me before. That turned out spectacularly well.”

“Fuck.” He says it softly, under his breath, but there’s no denying he knows exactly what she’s referring to, to the call she’d made to Charlie, forced cheer and swallowed pride all but begging for her old job back, before Will had had a clue, before he could have asked her to stay. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” She asks him staring at her own smiling face, blown up and smoothed out, on the wall across the hall.

“You were in love before you knew what hit you. You didn’t have a clue. I didn’t have a clue. By the time you realized, we were in deep. It’d been a year and a half. I couldn't see it, the way things were unravelling. You kept pulling at the threads, you couldn’t help yourself, you were terrified. I could never blame you for that.”

“I wasn’t hiding in the back of a closet waiting for it to be over.” All at once she’s bitter and aching like she had been earlier, scared not for the first time of the skeletons in her closet. They hadn’t found the police reports, not yet. Nebraska wasn’t Florida, but they weren’t impossible to find.

“No, that,” he shakes his head with a bitter chuckle, “that’ll never be you. You had to save yourself.”

“By fucking my ex.”

“You wanted a way out. How else could you have found one?”

“I could have left. You did.”

“I didn’t— that wasn’t something I wanted to do. My contract— I tried to tell you that.”

“I know.” She shakes her head trying to push the thought away. She didn’t want to think about that now, not when everything else hurt so much. “They had photos from her funeral. My mother’s funeral. What kind of people—”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“They,” she stops and swallows, turns away from the printed likeness of herself. “Who the hell takes photos at a funeral. Who— I wasn’t anyone—”

“You’d just left the DA’s.”

“That’s not, no one— How could they?” She drops off at a whisper, trying vainly to stop her hands from balling into fists.

“Come on, let me take you home.” He has his other hand on her back now, gentle, coaxing.

“I have to finish—”

“Not tonight, Mac. It can wait.”

But that was the thing, it couldn’t. There’s been a tension simmering beneath them, her and Will and Charlie, since the midterms in November. Will hadn’t said a word to her, hadn’t asked her for anything but Charlie had kept pushing, kept asking and she was running out of excuses.

She couldn’t breathe a word to him about her conversation with Leona, about the deal she’d struck. It’d be months before she heard the end of it and she’d lose what little control she had over the situation, but she wanted so desperately to explain so Charlie could stop looking so disappointed, so frustrated.

She’d made concessions, big concessions, but it wasn’t enough; she was running out of time. Will knew that, knew she was hesitating.

“I’ll grab my laptop. We can work on it at your place.” He’s compromising, she knows that. She hadn’t put together enough of a draft for him to be of any help, but he wanted her home, behind closed windows and a locked door, where she can stop pretending for a minute that everything was all right.

“No, it’s OK. You’re right. I’ll go home and get some sleep. It’s been a long day and it’s late.”

“Mac.”

“It’s all right. It’s not like I wasn’t expecting—”

“They had no right. That story—”

“It’s bullshit, but it’s predictable bullshit, Will. You know that. It’s the same crap people running for office go through while we rake them over the coals. Why would I—”

“That’s different.”

“Maybe not different enough.” She sighs.

“You’re a private citizen. That’s not—”

“Grief isn’t a public spectacle?” She laughs bitterly. “You’ve never seen the press coverage of a murder trial then. There certainly isn’t any sort of justice in that.”

“It’s nauseating.” He agrees softly, still too concerned to manage rolling his eyes at her sarcasm.

“It’s inexcusable.” She shakes her head roughly. “I always hated that part of the job. I thought I’d left it behind and then it turns out I’m the one—”

“You’ve never—”

“Sometimes I think I never should’ve left.” It’s a candid confession, one he clearly isn’t expecting. “The politics were bullshit but at least you knew what you were getting into, what it all meant.”

“Mac, you—”

She cuts him off shaking her head. “It’s not— it’s not,” she sighs. “It’s late.”

“Mac.”

“I’m going home, OK? We can talk about the show in the morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Magazine articles and cover mockups](https://daylightbegins.tumblr.com/post/189929853235/a-few-fake-magazines-i-made-to-go-along-with-my).


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't, check the warnings in the notes from [Chapter 1](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21854749).

She can’t remember why she’d thought it would be a good idea, why she’d invited him to join them when Katie had come to town with Frank to celebrate their anniversary. It was the one night she’d have with her sister and she’d invited Will, invited him again when Katie had suggested they head to her place for a movie before she and Frank went back to the hotel.

It had seemed like the right thing to do. She liked Frank, they got on well enough, but she’d wanted Katie to herself, and Will, Will had been such a convenient excuse to forgo the effort of occupying Frank.

The three of them had squeezed onto the couch, Katie next to her and Frank on the far side, Will happy to occupy the matching arm chair he’d bought himself, for her for Christmas he’d said, when he’d realized she had no interest in buying more furniture even if he’d needed something to sit on that wasn’t the kitchen stool or the floor.

The four of them had sat there laughing about the service at dinner while Frank flipped through the channels and then their movie night had come to a screeching halt, the TV turned off, Katie watching her wide-eyed in the way only Katie could.

“Shit.” Frank had said and then, “shit,” again, “I forgot about the—”

“Oh god,” Katie had filled in for him and they had said their goodbyes, promised to call in the morning and Will had left with them.

“Kate said you wouldn’t want to talk about it.” He hesitates, considering as she sips the last of her lukewarm coffee from the cup she has cradled in her hands. “She said it took a long time for her to tell Frank. I get the feeling she doesn’t know we broke up,” he raises his eyebrows inquiringly, “but even so, she said it took her a long time, and it was worse for you.”

“She told you not to ask, so you’re asking.”

“No I—” he sighs, deciding not to amend _you know I’m not_. “I’m saying, I understand if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“There isn’t much to say.” She steps over to the wastebasket to deposit her empty cup. “I think you can hear it, in the background, on the call. That goddamn film. I never understood why that’s the one thing she remembers from that week.”

This isn’t the conversation they were supposed to be having. Jack wanted to talk about work again, about her meds. He’d asked Will to stay because they both thought the outside perspective might help, but they were talking about Katie instead, about the memories they’d both tried to bury.

“I sent it to my dad for his birthday last year. He kept texting me, obnoxious shit. Most of it in the middle of the night. He’d started drinking again. I thought he could use the reminder.”

She drops her phone on the table and moves back toward the window as the recording picks up _9-1-1. What’s your emergency?_ She hasn’t listened to it more than a couple of times, hasn’t needed to listen to it more than a couple of times. She’s had the memory of it burned in her head for the last thirty years, another loop through, another trip down memory lane wouldn’t change that: how calm she had been putting the movie back on for Katie, picking up the phone, making the call sitting next to her mom, her tiny hand stroking her mom’s unmoving arm.

It’s mostly white noise now, the operator’s voice, her own quiet answers. She knows Will’s head must be spinning and Jack’s not going to be pleased with how detached she’s being but she doesn’t know why he’d expect anything else from her. She’s cried a couple of times in sessions, not big weepy tears, but still it had been something, had only been because of something Will had said in the few moments he shared at the beginning of her sessions because a few minutes of quiet chatter with Will held infinitely more probative value than the terse ‘it was fine’ she was prone to insisting upon when asked about her week. 

“Mac?”

He has questions, a million of them judging by the quiet look on his face, but he isn’t worried about that, he’s worried about her, and as much as he’s trying to hide it, it’s pretty obvious and she hates that.

“It’s not a big deal.”

“How old were you?”

“Five. Katie hadn’t turned four yet. My dad won that VHS off some guy playing darts at the bar.”

Will nods, considering. “At five I’m not sure I knew how to use a rotary phone.”

She wonders why he remembers that, wonders when she’d told him the only phone they’d had growing up had been the rotary phone in the hall by the front door.

“It was the only number I knew.” She neglects to add that that hadn’t been the first time she’d brought the cops to their house even though her mom had carefully explained what an emergency was, had told her it would be faster to run across the street to Mrs.Cameron if she got scared.

She hadn’t been scared that night. Her dad had left; she hadn’t needed to be scared.

“Your mom was OK?”

“The baby wasn’t.” She lets that sit tracing a line down the arm of the couch, letting Will watch the light play off the shoulder she has turned toward him. “Mom never talked about her. I never knew— I found out when we went to the cemetery to bury mom. I don’t know if Katie—”

“You don’t talk—”

“She calls me to talk about the boys, Jordie and Sammy sometimes, but mostly it’s Frank and her two. She’s been through enough shit because of me.”

“Mac,” It’s a gentle, coaxing sort of plea but she shakes her head.

“I left her alone. I wouldn’t leave mom, I couldn’t, but I didn’t have to leave her too. I could’ve insisted she stay. I didn’t see her until after school on Monday. She’d spent the whole weekend alone, spent the whole day alone because mom insisted I go to school. She always made me go to school.” She pauses to smile fleetingly at the thought. “I shouldn’t have left her. I don’t suppose Katie, Kate,” she corrects, achingly; she hadn’t been Katie in a long time. “Told you any of that.”

“She asked me not to ask, that was it. I made sure they found a cab and I walked up to 96th to catch the train.”

“Frank didn’t—”

“I don’t think Frank would. I’m not sure Frank knows what to make of me.”

“Frank doesn’t know what to make of a lot of things. You know he told her once he didn’t understand how a man could hit his kids, his wife, like that’s something you can explain, like that’s something that deserves an explanation, an excuse.”

“Mac, he—”

“He’s the All-American dream boy. I know. Katie’s fond of reminding me. He’s not our fucking father. He smokes sometimes and drinks a bit but he’s never had his ass hauled off to jail and he’s never once raised his voice to her in sixteen years. He just pisses me off sometimes. He’s chatty.”

“God forbid.” She knows Will’s hiding a smile. She’s agitated, but the knot in her stomach’s loosening, there’s a bit of bitter humor to her indictment of Frank and she knows he hasn’t missed that. “They seem happy. Kate seems happy.”

“She is.” She rounds the side of the couch and takes a seat all at once, rocked back into the cushions by the force of her movements. “He makes her happy. He wasn’t around when my dad was doing three month stents for drunk driving, two years for domestic battery. He was out of jail, in AA, taking Jordie and Sammy, his boys, fishing on the weekends when they started dating. She likes that he doesn’t understand, that he doesn’t have to. She wants her kids to have that kind of stability.”

“She wants that for you too.” He reminds her softly because he knows she knows, knows that’s why she’d never told Katie they had broken up. It hadn’t been a slip; she hadn’t wanted to break her heart.

“She doesn’t remember dad doing sixty days after mom got out of the hospital. He’d been picked up across town drunk driving twenty minutes after I called the cops. No one ever asked mom how she’d fallen down the stairs.”

“But he was there.”

It wasn’t a question but she shrugs anyway. “We were watching the movie because they’d been upstairs arguing. He was there. I didn’t see what happened.”

“Maybe that doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe it doesn’t.” She agrees remembering the way her dad had stood silhouetted at the top of the stairs before he’d rushed by her. “Even then I don’t think it mattered.”

*

She knows it’s not the best idea, sitting with her back pressed up against the door, anyone who knocked will know the second she answered that she’s not where she’s supposed to be, but it feels safer this way, her body an immovable force, and that’s all she cares about.

Jack had warned her about this, the panic, the sudden surrealness of a familiar situation but she hadn’t expected this, tonight. If she had she would’ve apologized to Will, or at least tried to, because she’s been taking everything out on him, her frustrations and the hopelessness of knowing things weren’t going well.

She was slipping, compromising, trying to ease the disappointment she kept seeing on Charlie’s face. It will never be enough, she knows that, but she keeps trying, keeps letting Will slip Tea Party coverage back into the rundown, keeps hoping, hoping, but nothing’s getting fixed, and it doesn’t take much, the fake smile she can’t wipe off of her face after a long night, or the way Will doesn’t turn to catch her eye when Jim mentions her in passing and she’s here: her pulse skipping through her veins, chest tight, ears singing.

She’s here and Will isn’t because somehow he’s avoided noticing, somehow she’s managed to push him away just a bit, just enough that he’s out there laughing at whatever joke Gary’s telling while she’s in here.

She’d heard someone poke their head into her office earlier, Jim she’d assumed, so she doesn’t think anything of it when the door whispers open again, closes. She doesn’t think anything of it, but it’s Will not Jim.

“Mac?” 

He doesn’t knock and she wonders why as she scrambles as quietly as she can to her feet. It would be an impossible task in heels on the tile floor so she’s thankful she’s already taken them off as she steps silently over to the sink and turns on the tap to cover the sound of her sniffling, the quiet clink of her heels as she steps back into them.

“Just a minute.”

“No, it’s—” he protests when she cracks the door open, but he steps inside when she turns to look at him.

“Did you need something?”

“No,” he leans back against the door letting it close again. “It’s not like you to miss a party.”

“I’m here.”

“That’s kind of my point.” He smiles a bit at his own cleverness and she shakes her head.

“I needed a minute.”

“It’s been thirty two.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Not for me.”

“All right then.” She says a little sharply, watching the way his feet shuffle, shifting even as he stays where he is.

“It’s all right if you’d rather not be here.”

“Would you stop.” She knows her glare doesn’t hold much heat, but she doesn’t drop her gaze until he looks away.

“Charlie thinks we might have breaking later.”

“Because?”

“He got a call, when he came back. I don’t know.”

“And?”

“Mike Tapley emailed me.”

“He’s available.”

“Yeah. Can you make some calls?”

“When I know what I’m supposed to be calling about.” She tips her chin toward the door behind him and he nods, reaching back to twist the handle without turning. 

“Let me know if you need anything.”

“Will.”

“I know. I,” he sighs glancing at her. “I’m here, OK, that’s all.”

*

The first time Jim had stopped by it was under the pretense of tuning her guitar. She couldn’t remember ever mentioning that she owned one, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if Will had been the one to let that slip. She’d needed the distraction, the previous Sunday’s 4AM, post-broadcast teary ‘Oh god Will, what the fuck are we doing?’ had been enough to show her that, but she’d still been hesitant, worried he’d ask for something else, and while he had, it was only to play a little, strumming contentedly as she’d fussed with the trinkets on the mantle Sloan had given her, straightened the rows of books Will had slowly managed to unbox.

“This is nice.” He’d told her and she’d glanced over, eyebrows raised as he’d peered up at her. “There are cheaper guitars if you’re looking for one to sit around collecting dust.”

“Is that your way of suggesting I let you take it off my hands?”

Still rattled by the ache of her confession it had seemed like a possibility at a time, but he’d been suggesting lessons, lessons she’d allowed for somewhat hesitantly until she’d realized he didn’t care what he was teaching her as long as she was playing the guitar, the guitar that at the time Will had given it to her would’ve cost her a month’s rent.

They pick their way through songs, some of the classics he insists on, but he’s just as likely to suggest whatever happens to come on the radio and so it’s an odd mishmash of songs that accompanies her late into the night when _Casey Anthony_ sits too heavily on her chest for her to sleep.

There’s a pack of cigarettes next to her on the window sill, tempting, but she’s been running more, craving the ache of tired muscles, and so she leaves them there as she works her way through the list of songs she knows, again and again, stopping to work on the rift Jim had been teaching her until her fingers ache too much to make string meet fret.

Will had told her before the show that Charlie had wanted to talk to her after, but she hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected Casey Anthony and the tired look he’d given her when she told him no, when she told him no then left because if he wasn’t interested neither was she, and she didn’t give a damn what Will had to say about that, even if he’s refused to stop calling her, her phone lighting up with each call and the texts she glances at only briefly.

 _I gave you a fucking key. What else do you want?_ She finally fires back exasperated as she considers the pack of cigarettes, the lighter invisible on the shelf where she used to keep her whiskey. He wants to bring breakfast. A bribe or an apology she doesn’t care, neither interests her much, but the silence after her reply, the quiet, feels like a blessing until she finds it broken by the sound of her own sobs echoing off the empty walls of her apartment.

*

She knows he’s there when she wakes up. He’s turned the radio on in the kitchen, just loud enough for her to hear, the faint snap of a snare, the quiet shuffling of his feet against the floor, the hiss of hangers across a metal rod. He’d found the dry cleaning she’d left hanging on a nail in the hall when she’d come home the night before.

She gropes half-awake for a blanket and feels him tug it free from around her ankles, pulling it up to settle over her head, the whisper of a breeze sending a lazy shiver down her spine.

She dozes off again almost immediately and wakes wondering briefly if she had dreamt the smell of pancakes, warm and sweet with the fake syrup Will found repulsive, but the smell’s still there, not lingering but hovering in the still, cool air of the room.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted milk.” Will’s there somewhere as she rubs a hand against her forehead, blinking.

“Bacon.”

“Bacon too. It’s in the kitchen.”

“Hmm.” She stretches, rolling onto her back to locate him by the door.

“You’ve been decorating.”

It’s been a while since he’s been here, she knows that, but the time feels more real now, seeing the way he smiles softly at the painting over her nightstand, the pot of silk flowers she’d picked up on an afternoon walk around the Village. Jack thought it was important that she start settling in a bit. Let the space exhibit a bit of personality he’d said, like that wasn’t a line straight out of a home decor magazine.

Will wouldn’t know that though and so his surprise is sweet, genuine in a way that makes her smile back. He hasn’t been here in weeks, hasn’t been going with her to see Jack, but she has been making a point not to push him away, not so much, not since the party, not since she’d called him totally wrecked coming down off the high of the bin Laden broadcast, the temporary all-consuming calm.

She’d felt rubbed raw, too vulnerable to take him up on his offer to stop by, but he’d stayed up for hours talking to her about everything and nothing while she tried to sort through the jumbled mess in her head, talking until she’d calmed down enough to tuck herself into bed. He’d been there. He’d been there, so she tried to let him be here now too.

*

They eat squeezed together on the couch. She’d shoved most of Jim’s detritus to one corner but hadn’t seen the point of removing it completely, so he balances his plate half on her knee watching the way she devours her food.

“If I’d known all I needed was pancakes,” he teases as she scrapes the last of the syrup from her plate. “I wouldn’t have bothered with a gift.”

She considers telling him off for trying to bribe her, for trying to make her forget how utterly pissed off she is that he could even consider covering Casey Anthony, because she knows eventually it’ll come up: that is why he’s here. He’s going to try and explain, gently, carefully, that he doesn’t agree but they’re going to have to do it anyway.

She considers telling him off but she’s too curious, gaze flitting from him to the hall and back again as he grabs her plate, setting it next to his on the plank covering the stack of boxes behind the couch, another gift of his, a clever invention.

When he hands her the box, the plain brown box it takes her a moment to realize what she’s holding: shoes. She drops the lid into his lap and brushes the tissue paper aside. It’s been so long, years, since she’d bought herself shoes like this that she takes a moment to run her fingers over the treads, the even ridges, before pulling one of the sneakers free.

“They’re the same ones you always got.” He tells her softly, laughter bright behind the words as she brushes a finger over the laces.

She had always picked out the same pair, guilty at the extravagance, but secretly pleased at his insistence that she have good shoes, the proper shoes, for the trail running they used to do.

“I thought you might need them today.”

“Today?”

“As long as we don’t leave it too late it shouldn’t be too hot.”

“Wait.” She looks at him and at the bright blue band running around the perimeter of the rubber sole in her hand. “You— wait.”

She stops again to press her hand into the shoe, flex the sole. She knows what he’s offering, but she can’t quite believe it, can’t quite let herself hope that it’s true. It’s been years since she’d set foot on a trail. The winding paths had felt too empty, too consumed with the loneliness she could run from on a treadmill.

It’s been years but she could have it back, the one thing that had defined so much of her life and she could have it with him. The thought of it makes her chest ache and she almost shakes her head, refuses him, but he’d bought her the shoes and she knows he wouldn’t take them back, knows eventually she’ll have to use them, step off the pavement into the mud, and she’d rather not do that alone so she offers him a tentative smile. “OK.”

*

They start by the station on Dyckman Street heading into the park. Will’s asked to pace her so they set off slowly, too slowly for her taste, but she doesn’t want to push him. He’s mentioned jogging a couple of times but she doubts he’s been putting in the miles she has.

He’s always been a seasonal runner, always run outdoors so it doesn’t surprise her how at ease he seems, how familiar he still is with the winding route they take as they head north toward the adjoining park, into Inwood. They slip off a walking path and onto a trail before returning to the main path around the park, but she’s impatient on the pavement, the concentration she’d been using to keep her footing suddenly let free again, and so they bound up a short flight of stairs and back into the dirt.

They’re keeping the same steady pace, one she has to work for now, and she smiles at that, at the way he’d known, despite the fact she’d forgotten that that’s what she had loved so much about trail running, the bit of unpredictability that left her with a keen awareness of the way she moved through space, the physical awareness that blotted out whatever mental gymnastics her mind had been doing.

She can’t do both, think and run, she can’t let the nervous energy overtake her so they keep running. They double up on the loop, and then start to slow, slipping past the start on their third pass to continue south, Will letting out a relieved sigh as he falls onto a bench outside the Cloisters.

“That was good.” He heaves out another breath and she smiles, leaning on the back of the bench to stretch her hamstrings.

“I don’t think my shoes are broken in.” She manages a passable frown. “I think we have to go again.”

“That’s,” he tips his head back to look at her. “You’d better be careful or I’m requisitioning you a treadmill desk.”

It’s an empty threat she knows that but she laughs all the same imagining. “I’m not sure the sound guys would be too happy about that, not to mention the advertisers. You know we can’t do brand deals.”

*

“OK.” She says as she drops onto the couch beside him, into the spot he’d cleared of Jim’s stuff while she’d been in the shower. “Dispense with the bullshit.”

She’d let them both settle into the high from the run on the way back to her apartment, but the higher the high the faster it faded, she knew that, and waiting till she hit bottom didn’t seem like the smartest choice.

“Can we eat first?”

She glances at him and he sighs.

“I hate it too.”

“But we still have to do it.”

“Yeah, Mac—”

“When did he tell you?” She’s not sure how she knows, why she’s suddenly realized that yesterday hadn’t been the first time Casey Anthony had come up. “When, Will?”

He’s quiet, studying the way his hands are splayed over his knees before he looks at her. “Tuesday. He told me on Tuesday, Leona—”

It’s better that the pressure’s coming from Leona, she knows that, but it still makes her stomach churn thinking that Charlie had agreed. “I don’t give a fuck about Leona, or Charlie,” she stops there, forces in a deep breathe so he has time to continue.

“I know this is hard.”

“It’s fucking tragedy porn.” She can hear that she’s angry, already pressing harder, louder than she should.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Not sorry enough.” She spits back and he does look sorry, so sorry, but he’s not backing down, she knows he can’t.

“I pushed back. I told him no. I kept telling him no, but sometimes you don’t get a choice.”

Normally she would have laughed at that, how at odds it was with his line from years ago, the one she’d heard time and again when she’d come home seething after a session with Jack, furious that he seemed to think she felt victimized by her life, that she was refusing to make choices to help herself. Will, maddeningly, would remind her that she always had a choice even if it was a terrifying, seemingly impossible one and maybe that’s what Jack had meant even though they’d known then that she could never see it that way, not when her life had been built on that perfect dichotomy: she either had a choice or she didn’t, she was either in control or she wasn’t.

That illusion was cracked now, chipped around the edges, something Jack would push at from time to time. She had a choice, she always had a choice and she hated that.

“I can write the copy. All you have to do is read it.”

She wants the lie back. She wants someone else to blame for the mess they’re in. He’s trying, in a way, to give her that, but she always had a choice the same way she’d had a choice the day Katie had called to tell her mom was sick, to tell her she was dying, the day she had walked out of the DAs office with a couple of trinkets and a plaque tucked into her purse.

She’d needed to head to the airport, to Chicago where Katie had been living for years, but she’d taken the train into Manhattan and sat at a table by the fountain in Bryant Park. She’d needed the city then, the manmade monument to time. She’d sat with a can of Coke trying to push images from the press conference she’d attended that morning out of her head, trying to forget the spectacle and the media circus, the fake tone of regret, the one that later had been real, dripping off the ends of Katie’s sentences as she’d pleaded with her to stay in New York.

She’d sat there until the fall breeze had turned bitter, and then, as she was about to leave, head to her apartment and pack a bag, Charlie had slid into the seat next to her. She’d recognized him, they’d met through Leona at a campaign fundraiser for her boss, an obligatory work event for her, another chance to curry favor for Leona, and Charlie, she’d never been sure what it was that had brought him there, but they’d shared a drink and a laugh, so she hadn’t been surprised that he seemed to remember her.

“Rough day?” He’d asked and she’d snorted, told him she’d quit her job, that she was going home, as much as she could call it that, to bury her mom. Justice was a lie she’d said and he’d told her to reconsider that, before he’d offered her the correspondents job, told her he had a couple of months before he’d lose his temper and fire the guy they had now so she could think about it. He was sympathetic without being condescending, sincere; she’d liked that he hadn’t pressed her, that he’d understood that her job was the farthest thing from her mind. He hadn’t asked her about it again, hadn’t asked her to take more time either when she’d called to accept his offer two and a half weeks later. She’d stood outside the church and called him, promised to fly in on Monday for a screen test.

Too used to the press briefings she’d been giving on the steps of the courthouse or in nearby conference rooms, the cameras had made her uncomfortable. The first few months had felt forced, but by the spring, by the time she’d had her first live panel, she hadn’t been able to imagine giving it up, even now she knew she couldn’t, even if now, maybe, she should.

“Let me take the heat for this.” Will coaxes, still pressing gently. “There’s a middle ground.”

“There isn’t.” She isn’t sure how long she’s been insisting, she’d lost herself for a moment to the aching doubt, but she knows she isn’t wrong. It’d been pretty clear that what was expected of her was Nancy Grace lite and she knew she’d have to deliver.

“Let me make the argument that there is.”

“Will.”

He stops, lays his hands back in his lap so he’s sitting quietly and she knows she must look upset. She doesn’t know why it’s gotten so much harder to tell around him, to press her emotions into the shapes she needed them to fit, but it’s his tells, the way his movements soften, that tell her to step back and take a breath.

“You don’t have to protect me.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He asks and she sighs.

She has no way of telling him that he doesn’t know what he’s asking, no way of letting him know that it’s so much more complicated than that. “I don’t want to piss off Leona.”

“I know.”

“No, Will,” she starts, but stops before she finishes. “We have to—”

“We don’t have to anything.”

“Yes. We do.” She’s angry again and he stops to let her pace across the room, fidgeting.

“Are you worried for your sake or mine?” He asks for clarification like he’s asking her about milk and sugar in her coffee, so calm despite the anger bubbling up in her. She knows he’s only trying to help but he isn’t helping. She wants to explain, but he isn’t helping and she can’t.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It might.” He tells her with a bit of a smile and she frowns bitterly.

“You make that sound like progress.”

“It’s new.” He tells her gently. “I know it’s scary. That’s OK. It’s allowed to be, but if you’re trying to scare me away, it’s not going to work. I’m not scared and you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that I should be.”

“I do it on purpose.” She tells him. “I sit down and I decide to hurt people. I know you know that.”

“That’s not what we’re talking about.” He reminds her, but he had been the one to change the subject, and even so that didn’t matter because, in a way, that was what they were talking about, the way everyone and everything hurt.

“You sit down and you decide to hurt yourself. You try and control it, that inevitable hurt. It never works. You’ve realized that now and I think maybe that’s what’s scaring you: that you keep trying, that you hurt people even though you know it won’t change anything. You don’t want to be that person.”

“I am that person.”

“No.” He sounds so sure of that, so completely convinced.

“He screwed me over, wrote that piece and I went back to him to—” 

“To try and stop yourself. You could have picked anyone, had anyone, but you picked him. You picked Brian because he disgusted you.”

She considers talking over him when he contradicts her. It’s become such a well worn conversation that it feels almost comforting even if it still hurts in a way she can’t describe, even if it hurts that he still thinks of her as the person who had done those things.

She shakes her head wanting to tell him no, but he’s not exactly wrong. She’d done it to hurt him, but she’d picked Brian knowing he couldn’t think any less of her than he already did, that he wouldn’t be able to see past his ego to her own motives. It hadn’t been the hardest choice, it’d been the easiest one.

She’d needed Will to go and she knew she’d never be the one to leave, that she could never make herself leave, not without knowing he could never forgive her.

“You told me if I ever, you told me,” she reiterates. “It was the one unforgivable thing and I did it.”

He almost smiles, she can see the way the corners of his mouth are twitching. “I knew the moment that I told you, the moment I laid it all out and said this is the one thing you could do to really hurt me, I knew then that it didn’t matter, that I’d do anything for you. I know you know that.” He says it softly, with a careful smile. “You’re scared and you’re hurt and I can’t fix that, but I’m willing to wait because I know you’re not that person. I’ve known that for a long time.”

“Will.”

This isn’t what they’re supposed to be talking about, this isn’t what she’s supposed to be saying. She’s supposed to be explaining, Jordie and Sam, and Leona, but it’s all jumbled up in her head with not wanting to hurt him anymore, with wanting to believe that he can fix things, fix this one thing, the way he thinks he can and there isn’t anything she can say, anything she can do but nod when he asks her again to trust him, to let him make the call on the coverage. There isn’t anything she can do.


	4. Chapter 4

She watches Jack slip out of the room, watches the smile slip off of Will’s face as they pass each other by the door.

“Should we be calling Jane up from DC?” Charlie, oblivious to the shifting tension in the room follows Will in, stopping to set yet another bouquet of flowers by the sink in the corner.

“Everything OK?” It’s Will inquiring about Jack.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?” She can’t tell if he’s asking because he’s worried, always so worried about her, or if he thinks she’s stretching the truth.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You were awfully worried I might think there was when you woke up.”

It feels like a slap in the face, one she certainly doesn’t deserve, but she keeps quiet as he peers at her. She’d told him because she knew he worried, because she didn’t want him to worry. She hadn’t imagined that he’d lend any credence to the suggestion: _this isn’t my fault._

“If something’s—”

“You’re such a damn worrier.” She sighs, knowing she can’t tell him to fuck off, even though she’d really like to, even though Charlie’s standing there still waiting for an answer to his question.

“Mac.”

“There’s nothing wrong. You told me yourself it’s just a bad stomach flu.”

“You’ve been worried about something—”

“It’s not.” She narrows her eyes frowning now, but he’s not budging.

“It’s not what?”

“It’s not anything.” She tells him a little more loudly than necessary and he raises his eyebrows waiting. “You’re being an ass.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Not sorry enough.” She grumbles but he only shrugs.

“Something’s been up.”

He wasn’t going to stop. She knew he wasn’t. It’s been like this between them since they’d started covering Casey Anthony, since she’d gotten drunk and called him the night of the presidential debate because they should have been covering that abomination and not the death of a child, the spectacle of a trial.

It’s been back and forth between the two of them, worry and then pushing: her, still, pushing him away, him pushing her in the opposite direction. There have been moments when she’d thought she could explain, when she’d known she could ease the tension between them but she’d allowed herself to be lulled by his proximity, by the way she no longer minded how close she kept him, how she could tuck her head against his shoulder, how it kept them both quiet.

It was a drug, a dangerous gamble she knew was going to have to come to an end now. She’d been letting them lie to themselves, and if he wanted to know, he might as well hear it from her before she let Leona throw her to the curb.

“I got these a couple of weeks ago.” She gestures for her computer, grabbing at it roughly to flip open the screen, pull up the email, the attachment, before shoving it back toward him.

She watches his eyes scan the photocopied page: black and white, ‘Criminal History Request Form’ written across the top in large sans serif font, the return address for the Nebraska State Patrol printed underneath. 

“How’d you get this?” It’s not the most pertinent question, but it’s perhaps the most relevant one.

“Turns out the only person Chris Tucker’s more afraid of than his old man is me.” She smiles at that, at the brief respite her amusement brings.

“Officer Chris Tucker?” Will wagers a guess and she shrugs.

“It pisses him off he’s scared of a girl so he told my dad someone was digging around. He wanted to scare me. Scared the shit out of my dad instead. He was pretty pissed when he called me. He thought I was the one digging around, trying to jam him up. I called the station, cited a couple of bullshit laws and Officer Tucker was nice enough to email that to me.”

“There isn’t much here.”

“The public record requests weren’t nearly as interesting: a name and an email address. That has an address, phone and fax numbers. I couldn’t find the fax number, the phone number must be the guy’s cell, and the address is for an office building in West Hollywood,. He’s smart but also incredibly stupid, the West Hollywood address is being rented by TMI. It took me five seconds and an internet connection to figure that out.”

“OK.” Will’s looking skeptical, glancing over her shoulder at Charlie who must be following her better than he is because Will’s look grows concerned as she continues.

“And who owns TMI?”

“We do.” Charlie’s sure of that.

“AWM?” Will shakes his head, “you never told me Leona—”

“You thought that was going to go away?”

“I knew she wasn’t happy, but this—”

“Wait a second.” Charlie cuts him off and she winces, waits.

“Leona mentioned she wasn’t happy with some of the coverage we’ve been airing.” Will offers graciously without so much as a glance in her direction, stepping in to cover her deceit.

“When?”

Will shrugs his reply in a gesture she would never be allowed to get away with. “I thought after Casey Anthony she’d lay off. You think she’s doubling down?”

The question is directed at her but she waits until he looks over at her to answer. “She doesn’t know what she’s looking for but she knows it’s there. I shouldn’t have been able to get my hands on the record requests. I would’ve known someone was digging around but I would’ve had no way of knowing the guy was on contract with TMI.”

“A flawless plan.”

“She’s clearly never spent time in a small town.” Mac snorts. “Not that it matters. She’d have to tell me eventually, when she’d dug up enough.”

“Has she?”

“She doesn’t think so.”

“But has she?”

“Records released to the public have a limited scope. They get expunged after a year or two without an indictment or conviction.”

“So, yes.”

“I don’t know how he missed it in the papers. He’s been at it a while, combing through whatever petty gossip litters the society pages. He found the writeup on my mom, the funeral,” she fills in when Will doesn’t seem to be making the connection. “I called Frank to double check after the tabloid story came out. I’d forgotten they’d sent someone from the local paper. I’d assumed we’d seen all the photos they’d taken, a couple at the church, one at the cemetery. I never thought to ask to see the rest, but he did, the douche. I wonder how much of a bonus he got when he broke that story.”

“Mac.”

She frowns at him. She knows deflecting isn’t going to do her any good but that isn’t a question she wants to answer, something she wants to put into words. She trusts him. She knows he’ll understand and that’s the problem.

“The records are sealed. The case involved a juvenile. The DA’s the only one with the discretion to unseal it.”

“And that’s not happening.”

“No.” She lets a smile flicker across her face. “We’re good friends.”

“But the record exists.”

“Yeah.”

“Which is a problem.”

“Indirectly.” She answers reluctantly. She knows she doesn’t have to say much, knows she doesn’t have to explain, but she knows he’ll let it drop, let it go, if he understands and he’s not going to understand if she doesn’t explain.

“A few of years ago Jordie had to do a project for his Psych class. They could pick from a couple of topics and he’d picked his first memory. For anyone else that would’ve been a safe bet.”

“What happened?”

“He asked me about the park by our house. He thought maybe he was mistaken, maybe we’d moved after, or I don’t know.”

“You lied to him.”

It wasn’t a question like she’d been hoping that it would be, but she continues like she hadn’t heard him, smiling wryly as she smooths the sheet across her lap, erasing the divot her computer had left.

“We didn’t have a park by our house. Just the local hospital. The ER was empty that day. We were in one of the exam rooms; someone had painted trees on the wall. Katie was supposed to be minding him, but Sam was teething and there wasn’t a thing in the world that was going to calm him down enough that Katie could’ve found something for Jordie to do.”

She leaves out the part about the dried blood on her face, the occasional drips she dabbed away with the wade of paper towel she kept pressed between her knees as Jordie had giggled, his tiny hands thrust toward hers as the singsong rhyming had continued.

“It was his favorite game for the longest time.”

“He doesn’t remember.”

“He was three.”

“He,” she can see him trying to understand, trying to fit the pieces together. “Later though.”

“Later when? When dad took him fishing with Sammy? When mom tucked them in at night? Who was supposed to tell him? Why? Should I have? Should I?”

She could never forgive him if he thought that she should and he seems to know that because his eyes look sad, look so pained that for a moment she has to look away.

“God, no, Mac. No. You only wanted to,” he pauses, quiet even as she presses him, barely whispering.

“What? Run away? Is that what you think?”

“No.” His voice drops too, low and quiet. “You wanted to keep them safe and you have and I don’t want to take that from you, or them. None of you deserve that.”

“Do you think Leona’s going to give a fuck?”

She feels him recoil, wondering, because there would be no way for her to know the damage she would cause. She would know it was enough, more than enough when her problem went away, or so it would seem, for a while. Public scrutiny was brutal but it was also fickle. She and Leona had laughed about catching flies with honey on more than one occasion, courting public favor. It wouldn’t matter that that was the less important factor, it was the one Leona would see, the weakness Mac had that the others didn’t. 

“She’ll get what she wants either way. I leave and you have a hell of a time finding someone to go within ten feet of the Tea Party or I keep disappointing you, giving her what she wants.”

“Mac, you never—” It’s a reflexive denial on his part soft and gentle, irrelevant enough for the moment that she ignores it.

“Either way she wins. Justice is what love looks like in public.” She adds scoffing, not at all surprised when Will counters her cynicism with the line she should have provided.

“Justice is equality under the law.”

She laughs at that, more bitter than she sounds. “That kind of justice never existed. Dreamers with their heads in the clouds.”

“Not in 1985?” The query’s the gentle sort that would normally earn him an answer, but she hesitates not ready to dredge up that particular memory.

He knows enough to know the date, to know how old she’d been but that didn’t change the fact that there’s no good place to start the story, no good way to walk through it all again without wanting to puke violently with the nervousness that had pervaded every retelling up until now. 

“If school hadn’t still been out for the summer I wouldn’t have been there.” She starts where her mom had always started, with the same raspy half-whisper that makes her clear her throat reflexively despite the way it burns.

“I don’t know what started it. It doesn’t even matter.” Katie’s start, trying to understand, looking for the answers she’d eventually given up on.

“It happened.” The answer she always gave Jack when his questions pressed up against invisible bruises. 

“I,” she raises her hand reflexively to the cheek that had stung hot with pain as the broken bottle had bit into the soft skin there. “She was unconscious for so long, in and out the whole way to the hospital. She had a couple of broken ribs. He’d taken off his steel toed boots but,” she shakes her head, dropping her hand back to the bed. “That time he could have killed her. Brutal intentionality.” She quotes the one set of closing arguments she’ll never forget.

“Mac you don’t have to.” He cuts in softly but she knows there’s no use stopping now.

“I didn’t have to testify. Mom made them promise. She didn’t want to let me but I insisted on sitting in court every day. I watched the entire trial. I’d seen most of what they were talking about first hand, there wasn’t much of a point in telling me I couldn’t be there. Mom was terrified. She cried the entire time she was testifying, but she knew he could’ve killed her, could’ve killed me and she wouldn’t have been able to stop him and that scared her more than he did.”

She can feel the weight of his hand on her leg, heavy and comforting but missing its warmth pressed against the sheet like it was.

“That was the first time I saw anyone stand up to him, you know. The only time I ever heard anyone tell him flat out that he was wrong. It had always been me. I’d swung a cast iron skillet at his head, backed him up so fast he broke his nose on a cabinet door trying to turn around, but even then he hadn’t listened, but he listened that week. It’s all there, every bloody brutal thing. Jordie doesn’t need to see that, especially in the papers. Sammy wouldn’t believe it even if I told him, but Jordie, Jordie doesn’t deserve that. He loves his dad. He was a different man after they locked him up that time, he got help. It wasn’t enough, but it was something, it gave Jordie a lot, gave Sammy more, I don’t want to take—”

“No,” Will agrees softly and she lets him cut her off, lets him quiet her when there’s so much more that’s close to spilling out. “We’ll tell Leona to go to hell before she tries to get rid of you.”

“What good would that do her?” If Charlie’s heard any of what she’s just said that’s not clear to her. “What makes her think either of us are going to stop—”

Will glances up, away from her, back toward where Charlie had wandered, and raises his eyebrows. “When was the last time you listened when Leona told you to shut up?”

“1992.” She knows Charlie’s smiling, that smile that says he’s enjoying himself more than he knows he should. “Mac’s not her only problem.”

“Maybe we should remind her of that.” Will’s look turns thoughtful as she shifts so she can watch them both.

“We’ve been talking about a Voting Rights broadcast.” He says it thoughtfully and then looks at her asking for permission. It was her broadcast, one of the scripts she kept writing and reworking, buying time until she figured out what to do with Leona. “Sloan will have to rework it. It’s going to have to sound like it’s hers.”

She feels his fingers grasp hers but she doesn’t look down, doesn’t look away from the way he’s watching her. It makes her stomach twist, thinking of giving the broadcast away, but she knows he’s offering her a trade, a trade she won’t turn down: Jordie, the boys, for the broadcast, for Leona’s silence.

“They’re supposed to be letting me go home.”

“It’ll have to be tonight then.”

“Yeah.”

“You OK with this?” He doesn’t look convinced but he doesn’t argue when she nods.

“Just do it right.”

*

She doesn’t say anything to Will, not on Saturday when they run through the script, not on Sunday before they go to air, when he’s leaning against the edge of her desk watching the way she fastens the buttons on the cuffs of her sleeves. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t say a word when Charlie doesn’t appear, when she doesn’t hear from him. She hardly says a word when she slips out after the lights go down despite the smile she has plastered on her face during the customary round of “good show.”

She’s hardly said a word so she isn’t surprised when she hears Will at the door, his key in the lock, his voice quiet as he pads down the dark hall, searching for her silhouette as she tucks the bottle of bourbon between her bent knee and her chest.

“Hey.” He whispers sliding down the wall beside her.

She doesn’t say anything, but by then she’s already crying so she figures he’ll forgive her later for not saying anything now, for not telling him what’s really bothering her, because it wasn’t the show, the usual letdown that hadn’t yet begun.

“I’m not going to take that from you.” He murmurs reaching to lay his hand on her knee and she has to stop herself from recoiling, instinctively unwilling to take him at his word. “You have other options now so if that’s what you think you, if that’s what you need right now, I won’t take it from you.”

She looks at him, the end of his nose, the contours of his chin highlighted by the light from the window, shockingly vivid in the otherwise enshrouded apartment.

She had other options, she’s had them for months but she didn’t want them now, not with a hurt this big, not when somehow she should have seen this coming. She should have known. She had known, but she’d wanted so desperately to believe in the weeks since she’d been home from the hospital that she was safe. 

She picks the bottle up cautiously, holding tight as she takes another swig before setting it beside her, waiting for the numbness to take hold.

*

“I’m not talking to him.” It’s conversational the way her venomous statements usually are, wrapped up in social niceties because she doesn’t give a fuck what Will says about people liking her, it’s not a habit she’s about to break.

“All right.” Will passes her another tangle as she finishes pulling apart the first one and she drops it into her lap, going back to the sticky orange frog she’d been trying to rip the jello-like legs off of. ”Any particular reason?”

She ignores the question.

“Mac?”

“No.”

Softer this time because she’d responded to his tone not his question. “Mac, please tell me why you’re upset with Jack.”

“I’m not upset with—”

“Why aren’t you talking to him?”

She glances at him then holds out a sticky orange mass, dropping it into his palm when he offers to take it.

“Can I talk to him?”

“You’re your own person.”

“OK.” He considers that as she frowns at the window, still too bright despite the turned down blinds, the water Will had insisted she drink the night before.

“Mac?”

She closes her eyes, resists turning back toward him when he lays his hand on her arm.

“I don’t want to be here.”

“We can go.”

Sometimes she wonders how he can be so patient, how he puts up with the slivers of information she gives him in lieu of the truth, but then there’s this, the aching need to explain.

“You promised me breakfast.”

“We can still have breakfast.”

It hadn’t been a bribe, but she’d taken it that way without considering that he’d had no way of knowing her reluctance to get out of bed had nothing to do with her aching head and everything to do with not wanting to see Jack. She hadn’t told him but she knows the pieces are starting to fall into place for him, knows he’ll feel bad about not knowing.

“He lied.” She whispers. She’s beyond caring if he hears how much her voice wavers, but she whispers anyway, not knowing if she can get the words out any other way.

“About what?”

He sounds genuinely curious. He sounds concerned but she can’t make herself say Charlie, so she says “people,” instead, says “I don’t know” instead.

“I don’t know about what?”

“Caring.”

“Who doesn’t care?”

She swallows.

He doesn’t press. He waits, runs his hand down her arm, plucks the sticky orange frog from her palm, reuniting it with the leg she’d severed she figures, although she doesn’t turn to look, just sits staring at the carpet until the syllables creep out past her teeth. “Charlie.”

It sounds so uncertain to her ears, although she knows that’s not it at all. She’s not questioning the validity of the statement, but her right to say it.

“You were both pretty quiet last night.”

“Last night?” She chokes on the words and she feels Will’s hand slip into hers.

“He didn’t come talk to you? Mac—”

He says her name so softly she can’t help but wipe at the tears spilling down her cheeks. He hadn’t come into the studio, hadn’t picked up a headset. Charlie had been there and she hadn’t known.

“He didn’t, he didn’t want,” she sniffs and keeps trying until, “he didn’t want me to do the show.”

She’d been angry at first, on Friday, but now it feels like it’s ripping her apart: the offhand comment, her own sharp no, the closest thing to “go to hell” she could muster in her shock.

“He said the show, the Voters— He said it wasn’t my fault. He said,” he said, he said, he’d said a lot of things, backtracking when she’d glared at him, when she’d told him she’d heard enough.

The broadcast wasn’t her fault, but it had been her fault she hadn’t been there. It wasn’t her fault Leona was pissed, even though Charlie wouldn’t admit that, even though she was the one that had secrets she wanted to keep. It wasn’t her fault but he didn’t want her on the air. It wasn’t her fault he needed her permission. It wasn’t her fault but would she please.

“Do you want a hug?”

She doesn’t want a hug. She wants him to envelope her. She wants him to take hold of her and never let go. She wants to go back to waking up with him asleep at the bottom of the bed.

She falls into him, curls into him as he strokes her hair, quietly shushing her, soothing her until the worst of the tears have passed and she’s breathing in carefully controlled bursts trying to resist the urge to fall apart completely.

“Charlie wasn’t mad, Mac.” He says, then says it again because he knows she’s not believing him. “He wasn’t mad. He was really happy with the broadcast.”

“He said.” She doesn’t finish. It didn’t matter what he said, only that he’d said it.

*

“What was that?” It’s an offhand comment but she knows he’s mad, trying not to show it.

“What was what?”

“You called Shelly.”

“I did.” She lets the words tip upward at the end, lets it sit as a question if he’s irritated enough to take it that way.

“I told you—”

“You said I didn’t have to.”

“I said—”

“I didn’t have to. That’s verbatim.”

“I meant,” he cuts in a little tersely, “leave her alone.”

“I didn’t apologize if that matters.” She leans back against his window sill, tips her head to watch him.

“No, Mac, that doesn’t.” He stops to sigh, pass a hand over his mouth. “Not everyone has to like you.”

“I can’t imagine that they do.”

“MacKenzie.”

“Not everyone likes me. That’s fine. That doesn’t have anything to do with this, unless you’re still mad I didn’t call Jim back.”

“I’m not—”

She’s pushing his buttons, she knows he can see that now. She’s been spoiling for this fight, wanting to get it over with so she can go back to ignoring the hints he can’t seem to stop dropping.

“I’m not mad. I’m frustrated, and you’re right that’s part of it. It’s been months since—”

“I know.”

He’s been reminding her for days now that she hasn’t had Jim over, hasn’t gone out with Sloan, hasn’t been out to see Bo or Ned. She was pushing them away, she knew that, but she doesn’t feel like she’s in a position to do anything about it and he can’t seem to understand why.

“Try.” He insists but she only stares at him, impassive. “Please, Mac. Please, for the love of—”

“I’m not doing it on purpose.” It’s a surprising concession, the words slipping out before she has a chance to consider what they might mean, because as much as she’s sick of talking about it she hates to see him like this.

“I know.” He softens a little, not relenting exactly but trying to be reasonable. “I did ask you not to call her.”

“You said not to apologize.” She bites her lip to stop herself from saying anything else: she’s sounding snappish enough, defensive enough. He may not be willing to argue with her but he isn’t going to let it go either.

“I meant—”

“I heard you the first time.”

“Mac.”

“I was trying to help.”

“Help with what?” She watches his eyes narrow, considering. “Who told you?”

“Told me what?”

“Don’t.”

“What?” She demands, glaring at him. “What the hell is your problem? You’re never around. You’re always nagging.” She forces herself to stop, to take a deep breath before her voice raises any louder. “Finally sick of waiting for me to get my shit together?”

She knows that isn’t it, knows that couldn’t be further from the truth, but she’s so sick of this, of the same argument, of him thinking she hasn’t noticed that he’s putting in more hours at the office and not just because Jim had been gone. He’s working on something and she hasn’t asked, hasn’t tried to find out what.

It hurts to see the confusion on his face, the sadness, she can admit that, but she knows he’ll step more carefully now, push less, stop goading her, so she doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t take it back.

“No. Fuck.” He tacks on quietly, obviously pissed at himself. “I would never— I’m sorry I haven’t been. I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much, there’s this—” he sighs. “I can’t tell you about it. Not yet.”

“You could have said that.” She says it flatly, almost cooly and he sighs again.

“I deserve that. I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to be alone. I should’ve said.”

“I—” Jack’s going to give her hell for this. Will wasn’t supposed to be doing her homework, learning the lessons, putting in the work, being honest and direct in a gentle sort of way. She knows it isn’t easy, not for anyone, but there he was, still mad, still hurt, apologizing, apologizing like this wasn’t mostly her fault.

“I overheard Neal. I knew he needed to talk to her. I knew he was working on something for you. I thought maybe,” she trails off. “I wanted to help.”

“Mac, no.” He says like ‘Mac, no don’t apologize.’ like ‘Mac, no don’t feel sorry. I’m sorry.’ “Mac?”

“No it’s fine. I’ll just keep fucking everything up.” She moves away from the window, past him before he can stop her.

“Mac, please.”

She stops at the door, palm against the glass.

“It’s not your fault. I know— It’s not your fault. Charlie, you two talked— I don’t, I don’t know what to say. Mac.” Her name comes out softly, gently. “I want to, you have to tell me how to help.”

“I’m going to go talk to Sloan about her segment tonight.”

“All right.” He seems reluctant to let her go, but when he doesn’t say anything else she leans into the door and lets it swing open.


	5. Chapter 5

Frank had emailed her during the show, a quick two sentence request to call Katie when she had a minute. That’s what had started the whole thing, the email and then later, half a block from her apartment, the call from Katie, her joke about patience dying in her mouth when she’d heard Katie’s voice.

Katie had said ‘for Sam, just for Sammy please,” like she thought her asking wouldn’t be enough, like she’d needed an excuse. Mac couldn’t imagine not being there, even when the thought of being there, even when the reality of being there makes her head spin.

Will had spent the weekend. He’d hardly let her out of his sight. Even on Monday as they’d prepped for the show, ran through the notes they were leaving for Jim for the following night, he’d been right there, promising they’d be back in time for Wednesday’s show like she’d insisted.

She’d had her hand on his arm, on his leg, on the flight, in the car, so she knows he doesn’t think anything of it when she presses closer, moves closer than he normally would allow on a night like this.

She’d usually spend a bit more on a hotel, even as close to the airport as they are, but the place is nice enough, holds up well enough to the tornado jokes, to the force of Will’s skull hitting the wall with a dull thud when she backs him up, presses forward, up onto her toes so she can kiss him.

“Mac.” He turns away to get her name out. He doesn’t need to but he isn’t taking any chances, isn’t going to give her an advantage.

This isn’t the first time he’s rebuffed her. He’d explained before, patiently, that he needed to be sure, of himself, that he could trust himself to know when she was being self-destructive, because that’s an impulse she still has there’s no use denying that, especially not tonight.

“Not here. Not tonight. You deserve—” he has to stop to gently take her shoulders, squeeze between her and the wall to move away.

There’s no use in trying to shove her away. He’d never manage it if she had her heels dug in and he wouldn’t want her to have that reminder, not tonight, not when tomorrow would be hard enough.

“Please. Please.” She tugs on his sleeve, yanking a bit when he keeps moving away, but he’s stopped refusing her, gently reaching back to cup her elbow, draw her along toward the bed.

“I can’t, not tonight. I need you to respect that.” He tells her softly and she wants to scream. She knows Jack has always meant well, pressing boundaries on her, but she’s always pressed back against them, always hated when Will decided on them for her regardless of what they were.

“I don’t want you to be respectful.” She’s stubborn and a little loud, but well aware of where they are, in a public place without the protection of a crowd, of familiar faces. “Will, please.”

“We can curl up and go to sleep or I can sleep in the chair.”

“You’re not being fair.” She’s gone from mad to teary in a way she knows might seem manipulative, but she knows she can’t change his mind if he won’t let her and that’s a frustration she can’t deal with. “I want—”

“I’m right here. I’m going to be right here even if you tell me to go, but I’m not going to sleep with you. I know that’s upsetting and I’m sorry, but that’s a fact not an opinion. You need to pick another option.”

*

She’s up early, dizzy with a cloying anxiety that sends her down to the gym, counting the seconds it takes for the door to click open. She pushes harder than she should. She knows Will’s going to be upset, not that he’s going to have to skip his shower so she can take one, but because she’s being reckless: not stretching, setting an unreasonable pace, pushing harder and longer than she should.

She needs it though, the burning ache of her muscles, to wrap herself in something outside of her own head, reinforce the walls she’s been trying to slam into place because she’ll never make it through today if she doesn’t.

It’s not just the memories, the way everything feels too close, uncomfortably close to the surface, but Katie’s anger, the disdain she knows is waiting for her from Sammy.

They’ll all slip back into old roles; she didn’t need experience to tell her that. They’ll be angry, she knows that too, anger was easier to deal with, easier to deal with when they could blame her, blame her for not being there, for not being enough, for being too much, for being here now and not then, it didn’t matter.

She’d tried to find a way to warn Will, to explain, but the anticipation had raised an ache in her chest she hadn’t wanted to confront, so she can see the shock of it on his face after Katie’s first angry swipe— there’s no venom, no real anger, it’s a swat not an angry hissing claws out attack. She’d been expecting that, expecting this so she doesn’t react, not to Katie and not to the wounded irritation on Will’s face.

He’s trying to be sympathetic, trying to be understanding, make allowances, so she knows he won’t say anything, not at first, but he’s clearly displeased, trading looks with Frank, as he insists Mac sit in the front with him, directly in front of Katie who’s already complaining about the state of the day.

There isn’t much to say about the funeral or the plot Frank had found in the corner of the cemetery outside of town, the plot nowhere near the churchyard where her mother had been buried. The service ends, the box is buried and they’re back at the church passing cups of coffee, trading stories, or the others are; she’s out back wandering through the headstones.

She knows what she’s looking for, where she’s going, but she takes her time, meanders a bit, trying to steel herself for the inevitable onslaught of emotion.

Sammy must come and keep the grave weeded, but she knows the flowers are from Mrs. Cameron, the plants still brown and muddy looking in the early spring. They’ll bloom later, but for now Mac knows the bouquet she’s brought will have to do, bright pink carnations tucked against the icy ground as she presses her free hand into the stone.

“It’s been a long time.” She shakes her head and whispers, waits a moment for the worst of the onslaught to pass, the gnawing ache to settle enough that she can move away, keep walking before Frank spots her hesitating and comes to join her.

He would she knew. He had a way of appearing when she needed the company as much as she resented it. He’d seen the worst of her grief, had stayed with her while she’d seethed with anger and ached with an impossible longing that she couldn’t share with anyone else, least of all with Katie.

She’d be all right if she kept moving, Frank would know that. He’d keep an eye out for her as much as he could but he has his hands full with Katie. Not so much while she was out here, Mac knew that, but they weren’t the only two members of the family with complicated feelings for one another.

There’s an old running trail by the far end of the cemetery. For a moment she thinks it might be gone, although she knows part of it’s a deer path, probably still used, probably trampled down by local teens looking for a quiet place to get away from prying eyes, but she has to look hard to find the trodden grass, the imprint of a track leading to the trail.

She had run by here a lot to get out of the house, get away, so the impulse is familiar, the need to run, to move stronger yet. She’s not wearing the right shoes, but she pushes forward stopping when she sees the bright blue bag hanging from a tree beside the trail.

Frank had been out here. She can’t imagine when he’d snuck away, when he’d managed it, when she’d been so careful to keep him in sight, but he had, he’d left shoes hanging in the tree, left the bag tied there where she couldn’t miss it.

She sheds her heels careful not to get mud on her feet, careful to tie the shoes properly so she’s less likely to slip, less likely to make a mess of the clothes she’s wearing; the blazer and blouse she slips off to trade for the shirt shoved into one of the sneakers, but she has to settle for rolled up pants, a concession to the weather more than a practical choice, a fortunate one given how impossible it would be to run in a skirt even if she’s only jogging, even if she’ll be gone for less than an hour.

*

Sneaking back inside is easier than it should be. If Will had been looking for her, there’s no mention of that, so she’s chatting with Mrs. Cameron, smiling politely from her perch on the counter in the kitchen when Katie wanders in.

“People want to say hello. They’re leaving.” Katie doesn’t say who although it doesn’t seem to matter, not with how sharp and accusatory the words are. “They’d like to see you.”

You. That was the problem. It was a funeral not a social hour and Katie resented her for turning it into one, even if she hadn’t, even if she’d never intended for that to happen. She doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to see them, doesn’t want to dredge up the memories, but they’d been friends to her mother, her quiet, silent support year after year so she has to pay her dues, be respectful even if Katie would rather she didn’t, even if Katie wishes it was her they were asking for instead.

She makes the rounds, a polite smile stuck to her face, thankful that Jordie was talking to Katie, bending her ear while Frank watched placidly from the corner, occasionally catching her eye, flashing her a reassuring smile.

“Walk for a moment.” He says later, when she’s managed to break away, when they’re standing outside of the house Sammy’s been renting, the small two story house home to the same group of friends he’s had since high school, the porch freshly painted, the front door ajar, lit invitingly from inside, but she’s not noticing any of that, she’s too busy trying to breathe around a sudden rising panic.

She stumbles after him, stepping behind him down the road until they’re several paces out of view of the house and the mailbox, the white mailbox and the ring of flowers, the early spring planting her mom had always insisted on even when it meant a black eye, even when it meant yelling and crying, even when it meant the flowers were inevitably trampled or half dug up in the morning. He’d hated the frivolity of the flowers, and now, here, she hates them too.

“I’d offer you a drink,” Frank smiles like he hasn’t noticed how quickly things are falling apart and she’s grateful for that because he’s fishing out a pack of cigarettes, lighting one for her. “This is the best I can do.”

She grabs for the proffered cigarette, inhales and inhales again before instinct and habit kicks in and she shifts up wind from him, takes a couple of steps farther and discards her blazer so the smell of smoke won’t cling to it before rejoining him.

Katie would be pissed that Frank was smoking again, livid given how the day had been going, but Mac would escape the worst of her scrutiny. Frank had always given her that, had always taken the blame, insisted Mac had only been keeping him company.

Will too would be mad in that quiet way of his that meant he wanted better for her, but Katie would be the only one saying anything. Katie was the one she had to worry about and for now, in this, she had Frank for that.

“Good?” He asks after she’d made her way through the better part of what had been remaining of his pack and she sighs, nods slowly, before rolling her head across her shoulders, settling back into her own skin.

“The whole day’s been shit.” It’s more honesty than she’s willing to offer anyone else right now, Will included, but she doesn’t reconsider, not with Frank, she’s never had to. He had a way of folding things in on himself, hiding her words. Frank didn’t know the first thing about what it was like, but he knew how to keep a confidence and she respected that, had come to count on it during the few brutal days like this they’d shared.

“We’ll be out of here in an hour or two.”

“Yeah.” She sighs her agreement, grinding her butt out underfoot. “Might as well.”

*

Jordie’s trying to get a moment of her time, she knows that, she can sense his disappointment, first when Katie lays into her and then Frank, and then into both her and Fank, voice rising until Frank had insisted they continue the conversation outside, the two of them, leaving her behind. Leaving her behind for Will to fuss over as it turns out because there’s no one here, just the four kids and whoever they’d brought along. Sammy’s roommates had disappeared and while Sammy hasn’t, he was keeping his distance, holding his tongue. He’s hardly said two words to her all day and she could understand that, understand how much safer that must feel.

So it’s her and Will and Jordie waiting, waiting until, “Mac.” It’s Jordie at her elbow, quiet in a way she knows is unusual for him. “I wanted you to meet, Kara, this is Kara, she,”

He stops when she smiles and Kara holds out her hand, the two women charmed by his stumbling. Kara, it seems, is genuinely amused by Jordie’s nervous awkwardness, something Mac finds she likes.

They had met at the church, Kara appearing with a bottle of water when Mac had first ducked outside, seemingly for air, for a moment alone. It’d been a sweet gesture, a generous one, when she’d offered to stay and sit silently so Mac could have a moment to think without being bombarded by the crowd of once familiar faces all wanting a sad smile or a murmured word of gratitude, a task Mac hadn’t felt up to at that particular moment.

She was good at appeasing, at faking it, at saying and doing the right thing, but in that moment she’d been grateful that she didn’t have to, that Kara clearly wasn’t expecting that from her and still, now, isn’t.

“You’ve known each other for a while.” Mac decides as Kara nods, agreeing as Jordie frowns considering her enigmatic observation. “Which one of you insisted she make the trip?”

“Mac.” Jordie isn’t pleading, isn’t warning her off, he’s only asking her to be nice, only asking her to take it easy on him like she might consider giving him a hard time like Katie had when they’d first met, because Mac had heard about that months ago, had suspected they’d all met up when Katie had brought up ‘that girl he’s got a crush on’.

“Hmm,” she hums waiting to see what he’ll make of that and Kara laughs, a bright sound she’s not entirely expecting, a sound that startles a genuine smile out of her. “On a scale of one to ten how much do you like surprises?”

Kara doesn’t hesitate. “Eight.”

“All right then, Jordie, keep that in mind.”

“Mac.” It’s Katie interrupting, no less angry than she had been, but sounding more civil. “I need to talk to you about the estate—”

“I’m taking care of—” Jordie cuts in, but Katie pretends not to hear him, grabbing Mac’s arm before anyone can protest.

“It’ll only take a minute.”

They all know that’s not true. There isn’t anything Katie needs to say to her, about the estate or otherwise, but there’s a lot she wants to say, but not in front of Jordie, she has enough sense not to do that, not to hurt him too, not when he’s not the one she’s mad at, not even if Mac’s been the one to bear the brunt of her anger for years.

“Jordie was just,” she glances up, toward Will, hoping to meet his eye, gain a distraction, an excuse, but Will’s turned to say something to Frank and Katie’s noticed that she’s looking.

“Prince Charming tired of playing his role.” It isn’t a question but it rolls of Katie’s tongue like it might be, all barbed edges and dark insinuation. “It’s been cute, but the two of you can stop pretending he’s interested in anything but his job.”

It hurts in a way it shouldn’t. She’d thought the same thing herself in the beginning, had let him rebuff the argument, had learned to rebutt it herself, but it’s coming from Katie, Katie who for all her fury was the one that had helped Mac hold her life together for so long. 

It hurts in a way it shouldn’t, in a way she can’t control and for a moment she feels like she’s careening unbreathing through space. 

Katie looks smug, looks pleased that she’s finally managed to pry a reaction out from behind the walls of steel Mac had insisted on maintaining. She’s smug and she’s pleased, but it’s a look Mac registers only in hindsight, because it’s Kara who’s at her elbow, steadying her when she takes a step back wavering, forcing air down her burning throat until Will looks over and she feels the tears start to slip down her face.

It feels like an eternity, perched on the edge of the couch, sniveling while Will holds her, murmuring quietly into her hair, trying, she thinks, to drown out the sound of Frank stomping around. He’s in the kitchen alone. She’d heard the door slam as Katie had stomped down the porch stairs to get away from him and his mounting disapproval.

It feels like an eternity but it’s only a matter of moments until she’s apologizing to anyone close enough to hear, anyone inclined to listen.

“Mac.” Will quiets her and she lets him, lets him dab at her eyes with the tissues Kara must have found, before she takes a wad and blows her nose, rubbing at her eyes, irritated by the way her damp eyelashes stick together.

“I have makeup wipes.” Kara offers and Mac sniffs.

“She’s not normally—”

“The woman has a temper.” Kara says gently with a shrug that would normally make Mac furious but she finds it comforting now, the honesty behind such a universal gesture.

“Did my—” she turns to Will, unsure of Kara’s offer and he shakes his head, thumb skimming along under her lashes.

“It’s fine.”

“I have to—”

“Mac.” He stops her with a hand on her arm, heavy and insistent. “This is her mess.”

“I have to—”

“You can’t save her from herself.”

“Will.” It’s sharp and angry even if she knows he’s right, that at some point she’d have to cede that responsibility and let Katie worry after herself, let Frank, but the impulse to apologize, to smooth things over if not for their sakes then for Jordie’s still tugs at her and she hesitates.

“I know.” He insists gently and she sighs frustrated. “You can forgive her all you want, but let her learn to ask for it.”

“It’s not—”

“About that?” He smooths his hand across her forehead. “Maybe not tonight, but it’s not a bad place to start.”

*

He had offered to take the night off, leave the office on time and spend the evening with her, but she’d left before he could make up his mind, before she’d had to face another disappointment. He’s been working a lot, playing keep away in a way that she isn’t sure is intentional, but it’s still hard to deal with when she can’t stand the thought of letting him go, when she can’t get him close enough. Even if tonight, like so many nights, she was making sure he wouldn’t be able to reach her when he finished up.

She was at the gym. Officially they closed at nine thirty but Ricky was always willing to stick around for her and whoever else decided to wait and see if she showed up. Tonight Josie was the only one there. Perched on a stack of mats, she tips her head to the side, considering, when Mac walks in.

“Need to get your ass kicked?”

“You can try.” The banter and the glib smile are instinctual at this point, but Mac doesn’t mind how effortlessly it all slips back into place, the feeling of belonging and predictability. She never spared this late at night, but she would run drills, ruthlessly, relentlessly until George showed up to follow her home or Ricky kicked her out around eleven so he wouldn’t ‘get in trouble with the misses’.

“All right.” She hears Josie’s feet hit the floor cat-like when she passes and she smiles, shrugs her gym bag onto the floor beside the door to the back room, the studio she usually used for her workouts.

They run through the usual warm up, work the bags for a while until Mac feels her shoulders relax and the rest of her slips into place behind the repeated, well-worn rhythms.

Josie never minded when Mac wanted to run through drills. Unlike Sloan, she never minded Mac’s foot swinging up toward her face, her fist coming to stop beside her ear. Josie doesn’t mind and she doesn’t ask either, not anymore, just yanks off her gloves and unwinds the wraps she’d been using before grabbing the targets propped up against the wall.

“All right?” She asks, permission and confirmation both, and Mac grins, steps back a couple of paces and kicks. It’s the usual set of drills: forward, backward, high and low, jump, turn, spin. Josie steps forward, too close, intentionally too close, and Mac lets her fist slide through the air to connect with the target, push Josie back as they both chuckle, Mac shaking her bangs off her forehead in the process.

“Not such a bad day then.” Josie suggests and Mac grunts. They never talk much while they practice, Mac in particular tended to stay quiet, but she doesn’t mind Josie commenting, making suggestions. She never pried, never expected anything more than raised eyebrows so Mac let it go even on the worst nights.

“Your man looks nice. Real dapper.” She teases as Mac ducks to avoid getting swiped by a moving target. “Looks real nice in beige.”

“What?” There’s something that doesn’t make sense about that last comment and it takes Mac a moment to realize what. “When did you— what?”

She shakes her head, dropping back, putting an end to the vollied assault. “You’ve seen him?”

He had dropped her off the day they’d flown back from Nebraska that was true, but he hadn’t left the car and she can’t remember seeing Josie around that particular morning.

“That’s him isn’t it?”

“Where?” Mac turns to where Josie’s looking and groans before she can stop herself.

“He wasn’t supposed to be stopping by?” Josie wagers and Mac groans again, this time intentionally, brushing her sweat damp bangs from her face.

“He’s supposed to be working.” That was true to a point. He’d offered to take the night off, suggested like he so often did that all she had to do was ask, but she never would. He had to know that, Jack would certainly point that out if she’d bothered to tell him. She wouldn’t ask, she hated the thought of asking, knowing she needed to, that she wanted to even if a night off meant another night she wouldn’t, couldn’t have.

“Looks like he took the night off.”

“Yeah.” It’s a blunt agreement, a little sour given the surprise on Josie’s face but Mac doesn’t bother clarifying. 

She’d had other plans, had been hoping George would show up. He would’ve been here by now if that were the case, but she still feels a little bitter, still blames Will for that, for not being invited up to George’s place to say hi to his mom and his grandmother, to check in on Gus, to be wrapped in the familial laughter that still felt so foreign to her.

“What?” She says when Will looks up to where she’s standing in the doorway, Josie still behind her.

“Hey.”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“No, but I thought you might be.”

“And you missed me.” The words are sharp, chafing as he sighs.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” She dismisses him leaning down to grab her bag.

“You had other plans.”

“What do you think?”

“It looks like you were having a good time.” He’s being honest, being patient about it, trying, she knows. Trying and hoping she would reel in her temper because this wasn’t the place, even though it was, even though this was the safest place for her to be angry. “You can finish up.”

“I don’t need your—”

“Should I go?”

She watches him for a moment unsure, not about him leaving, but of him being here in the first place. She’d never told him not to come, hadn’t specified that even after she’d known he knew where the gym was. This wasn’t her place, Sloan was here regularly, Maggie and some of the other staffers she knew had started stopping in on occasion on her recommendation. This wasn’t her place even if he’d always allowed it to be.

She sighs still considering and he hesitates, shakes his head at himself. “I shouldn’t have— I’m sorry. I missed you.”

He looks away, giving her an out, she knows that, but it’s a shy gesture, a vulnerable one that makes her want to step closer, one that dulls her anger and irritation.

“We could,” she tries and then stops because she doesn’t know what to say, because the thought of what she might say terrifies her in a way she hasn’t begun to unpack. 

She wanted him close, closer than she ever had, but was this too close, and she wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure how she was supposed to know.

“Dinner?” He suggests even though she knows he knows she’s already eaten. She almost always ate a full meal before the show now, preferring a post-workout shower and snack to satiate her nocturnal cravings; the less time she spent at home, awake, the less empty the apartment felt. The less empty she felt.

“I need a shower.”

“All right.” 

He’s waiting for her to decide what she’s agreeing to: a shower here and dinner out, takeout and a shower at her place, dinner as just a pretense, an excuse for Josie.

“Ricky’s going to want to lock up.” It wasn’t a decision. It wasn’t an observation either, not really. Ricky would stay for a while if she wanted him to, the exact timing was less important when she wasn’t intent on destroying one piece of equipment or another.

“I don’t want to hold things up.” 

She almost smiles at how diplomatic he sounds. She knows he’s making the effort for her, because frankly, she doubted he cared all that much about Ricky’s schedule. He would have seen the sign on the door, known the gym was closed.

“Who let you in?” She’s suddenly curious, wondering, irritation sated by her need to know.

“Sloan called ahead, vouched for me.”

She looks up, away from him, through the main room toward the front where Ricky, obviously listening, shrugs with a good natured grin.

She shakes her head, letting him know she’ll lay into him later, tease him a bit, but for now it’s Will she’s interested in. “Your place is around the corner.”

He doesn’t bother confirming that. She knows which building it is, which apartment, even if she’s never been inside.

He’d invited her of course, but she’d always turned him down so she’s not surprised when he seems to think she’s joking even as she heads off in that direction, pausing only when she’s standing outside his front door.

“Well?” She glances at him, waiting and he sighs.

“You don’t have to—”

“Will.”

She knows he must be wondering if she’s doing this for all the wrong reasons, finally showing up after all this time unprompted, but she’s not interested in analysing that tonight, in thinking about it at all so when he pushes open the door to his apartment and stops to pull his key from the lock she walks right in, spinning slowly to take in the space.

It’s not the same apartment he’d had before. She’d been expecting that, but she hadn’t expected it to be this different. The height of the ceiling startles her. It’s a lofted space, grand and open, but also empty in a way she hadn’t anticipated him liking.

The furniture is still very much him, warm and homey if not particularly inviting with it’s brown leather and plush muted tones. The whole space smells like him, like the way she remembers his apartment smelling, even as she wanders up the stairs to the bedroom.

She’d been expecting him to protest, but she can hear him down in the kitchen. He hasn’t followed her up. He’s let her be. He won’t need to protest now, she’ll grow bored on her own and wander back down to see what he was fussing over in her own time, no aborted advances or prying questions to confront.

She runs her hand over the comforter wanting to fall onto the bed, but she knows she won’t, not now and certainly not after she’s showered as tempting as that would make things.

She has a bottle of shampoo and a half-used bar of soap in her gym bag, both of which she grabs when she wanders back downstairs. There’s no point in tempting herself into hysterics tonight even if she thinks that might be what he’s expecting as he sorts through the papers scattered across the table sitting in front of one of the large floor to ceiling windows.

The bathroom’s oversized for an apartment like this and well appointed on top of that: the shower is heavenly, but she isn’t surprised by that. Will’s always had an eye for the minor luxuries.

She wants so badly to tempt him, but she knows she’ll only push him, shove him up against a metaphorical wall and she knows she can’t, knows that won’t go anywhere anyway because she’s here and he doesn’t know why, not exactly.

She does want to push him away, push and push because she can, because it’s still easier to push him away than it is to push the feelings away, but even that’s getting harder and he knows that, knows tonight, being here, must be dredging up a whole bunch of shit even if now it doesn’t feel like that, not to her.

She’s been leaning on him a lot lately, letting his mood set the tone of their interactions. She’d told Jack, told Jack she was being lazy but he hadn’t agreed. She’d been doing a lot of hard work he’d said like that was supposed to mean something, like that was supposed to change the fact that she was here, now, to poke her finger into old wounds.

“I hope pasta’s OK.”

Will has the table set when she leaves the bathroom, two chairs brought over to the window.

“Yeah.”

“Should I order dessert?” He asks pulling out her chair and she shakes her head as she sits, pulling her plate closer to inspect it so she doesn’t have to say anything.

“It’s mostly from a jar.” He warns her even though he knows she doesn’t care; she’s never been particularly fussy about where her food comes from. He’s not telling her because he thinks she cares, he wants her to say something, she knows that. She’s been quiet, deliberately so. She hasn’t given him much to go on. There’s no way for him to tell what she’s feeling, what she’s thinking.

“I’m sorry I’ve been working so much.” 

She hasn’t even brought the first forkful of food to her mouth before he speaks and she wonders why he thinks that’s a safe place to start. She’d been mad before, but not furious, he could have mistaken that for bluster, for something else entirely, because there was some truth to that. There was almost always some amount of truth to that.

“It’s the damn story.”

“I know.” She says and he sighs. “It’s fine.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” He says gently, cautious, she thinks, more of his own feelings than hers because she can see it now, his feeling of responsibility, because damn him he still worried.

“It’s fine.” She insists with enough of an edge that she knows he’ll let it drop. She doesn’t want to talk about this, doesn’t want to hear about what she should be doing, thinking, feeling. She gets enough of that from Jack and she’s sick of it.

“I can’t tell if things are coming together or falling apart but it shouldn’t be too long before—”

“God.” She snaps dropping her fork back down to her plate with an explosive clatter. “I don’t care.”

“I do.” He’s looking at her. She knows that even though she isn’t looking at him, won’t look at him. She’s irritated, angry, but not enough to hurt him, not enough to want to hurt him.

“I miss you.” He says and it’s the vulnerability that gets to her, that eats at her. It’s the vulnerability she still won’t allow herself to feel even after all this time, even after all the progress Jack insists she’s made.

She sits turned away from him. She doesn’t move, doesn’t get up and walk away even when he brushes a finger on her shoulder in a silent request.

“That’s not my fault.” She isn’t sure why she says it. She’s not sure she should have, but he seems to be thinking about it, his finger returning to trace the slope of her shoulder, the side of her arm.

She’s surprised by the gesture, surprised that he wants to be this close when he knows she lashes out, knows she could, knows she has. She would she thinks, considering that, while he considers whatever it is that’s playing through his mind. She had lashed out tonight when she’d seen him, when he’d surprised her. It’d been instinctive, almost habitual, but in a way that had startled her the same way his capitulation had, the same way he had back in the beginning, back when he’d showed up again. Maybe that’s what was unsettling her now, maybe that’s what’s eating at her or maybe it’s just Jack, the way he insisted on pushing her even now that Will wasn’t, even now that maybe they’d found some sort of equilibrium as tentative and improbable as that felt.

“Jack says I don’t need you.” She figures that’s a decent enough apology, for Will, only for Will, an olive branch she wouldn’t have otherwise offered.

“What do you make of that?” He asks her still thoughtful and she almost doesn’t answer flushed with anger at the realization that he hadn’t immediately dismissed it as utter bullshit.

“What the fuck do you think?” She knows it doesn’t sound angry. It’d been too quiet and too unsteady for her to be angry. She’s scared and he seems to know that.

“Need isn’t the same thing as want.”

“No.” She dismisses the idea emphatically, shaking her head, fingers stretched suddenly tight around the edges of her chair. “No that’s—”

She stops when she feels the weight of his hand on her arm. “Mac,” he says softly, “hey, it’s OK.”

But it isn’t OK because needing isn’t the same thing as wanting. Wanting meant there was a choice. Jack had made sure to drive that home although he hadn’t said that wanting meant Will had a choice. He hadn’t said that even though they both knew Will could go, if she didn’t need him, if he didn’t need to put up with her he could go, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t do that, she needed him.

“No.” She says again just as emphatically as she stands, feeling him mirror the gesture, the bulk of him tall and solid behind her.

“Mac,” He says her name tenderly in the way no one else was allowed to, in the way no one else ever had. It wasn’t ‘Mac, please’, or ‘Mac, no’, or Mac, anything else. It was just her name, just a reminder that she was here, here with him. “Work needs a little time but I’m not going anywhere.”

It sounds more like a promise than it normally did, the affirmation that she wasn’t about to shove him away, but maybe only because she wasn’t shoving at him, wasn’t pushing, maybe only because it wasn’t her choice this time but his.

“I know it’s a hard thing to have faith in.” He’s trying for soothing but she can’t hear it. She isn’t pushing him away, but there’s a space between them, growing. That was her fault.

“I should go.” She says quietly under his continued careful insistence. She’d wanted to tell him that she shouldn’t be here, because that felt more true, but that hurt more, the way this space didn’t feel like his, not in the way she thought it should, not in a way that had room for her.

They could pretend. She’d wanted to up until a minute ago, but there’s a weariness now to the thought that pulls her toward the door. She’d come here needing, what, she wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been pure stubbornness or anger that had brought her here, she’d have been here long before now if that were the case.

She’d been looking for something, for some sort of sign maybe, some part of herself or perhaps a part of him reflected in her own space as impersonal as it still was. She’d wanted something and she hadn’t found it. She hadn’t found it and she wasn’t interested in further investigation, not when it meant carving through her own chest to do it, some sort of twisted archeological dig that would lead to a tear-soaked confession when Jack asked her how her week had been.

She’s expecting him to ask her to stay or maybe to ask her not to go, although that seems less likely, so she’s surprised when he follows her to the door, the sound of keys clinking startling her enough that she stops to turn around as she reaches for the door.

“There’s ice cream in the fridge. Your fridge.” He clarifies when she looks at him confused like that was supposed to explain anything. “The food will be fine. I’ll stop by tomorrow and clean it up.”

“You,” she starts but she finds she doesn’t have the words to suggest that he stay.

“You want your bag?” He reaches down and picks it up, settling the strap against his shoulder.

“OK.” She says although she isn’t sure if she’s agreeing or asking him a question, because this all seems so normal to him even though it feels so odd to her: unsettling, unreal.

Tonight hadn’t been the right night. He’d seemed to know that, but he’d let her figure it out, was letting her figure it out.

“You can come back tomorrow too, if you want.” He promises with a smile and she wonders how he’s standing there like there’s nothing unusual about her stuck frozen in a doorway.

"I—" She says and then nods vaguely letting him guide her silently out the door.

*

He hadn’t been able to tell her much ahead of time. She knew it was the story, the one he’s been working on for forever. She knows that and she knows he’s promised her more time, more space if she needed it to think, to consider, because this was being sprung on her in a sort of cruel way she realizes that as the evidence piles up and she starts to consider what she’s going to say, what she needs to say because it’s clearly not what any of them are expecting, not if they’re all sitting there watching her expectantly.

When she says no she can’t look at him, can’t bear the look of disappointment she knows will be on his face, personal or professional it wouldn’t matter. The unease roiling in her stomach is hard enough to contain on its own, she can’t deal with much more. They could find someone else, would find someone else if they needed to, if her reasoning doesn’t hold, but so little of that matters to her right now.

“If you need—” His voice isn’t soft like it would normally be. It isn’t the gentle sort of offer that might make her consider, reconsider, it’s firm and careful but businesslike, for her benefit or his she isn’t sure.

“No.” She shakes her head for emphasis, just once, and forces herself to glance at Charlie who’s still standing in the corner, Charlie who doesn’t look the least bit surprised that she’s hesitant to go along with the story they’ve put together.

“You don’t trust me.” Jerry isn’t stupid, she’ll give him that. He’s not particularly perceptive, but he’s paid enough attention to notice she’s never made the same effort with him as she did with the others.

“I don’t either.” Jim reiterates, backing up her almost silent refusal.

“You—”

“That’s enough.” She cuts them off, daring, finally, to look at Will. She’s going to need his help if she’s going to untangle them all from this mess. She doesn’t want to do this, she trusts them, Charlie, Will, and Jim, but something is unsettling her, something doesn’t feel right and maybe it is just Jerry, maybe it’s the fact she can’t stand his knowing sneer, but it’s enough to make her push back despite her anxiety. She’s always trusted her ability to read people, to suss out the tiny details, and there’s something here, “something’s missing.”

“There’s nothing—”

“Something’s missing.” She insists with a firmness that Jerry seems to know better than to argue with. “I’m not going on the air until I know what it is.”

*

She finds it a week later, the skipping time, the shot clock that had destroyed the first of the lies. She’d told Will, showed Will, but she’d left the rest to him, let him fire Jerry, let him deal with Charlie while she’d combed back through the rest of the evidence, laid it all out like a criminal case, picked it apart and tried to put it back together again. She’d left the rest to Will the way he was always asking her to.


	6. Chapter 6

The studio was safe. She’d never stopped to question that, would never consider questioning that, but Jack was, patiently, insistently asking her to describe what it was that she liked about the studio, about being on air. She wasn’t answering him. 

She’d been honest, earnest in a way that was still unusual for her, but that had been before she’d realized he was trying to insinuate something, even if what that was wasn’t clear. She’d stopped talking long before she’d been able to draw that out.

“Mac.” She hasn’t stopped listening despite what he seems to think, but she isn’t responding. She can’t see the point when she knows he isn’t going to stop peppering her with questions she has no intention of answering.

“We have ten minutes left on your session.”

There were days when she came and just sat in the corner fiddling with his box of trinkets, the sticky frogs and fidget toys, it’s part of the reason she’d agreed to start seeing him more frequently toward the end of last year, but he still insisted that on days when they were having sessions that they have a session, that they keep that routine.

She could decide what she wanted on any particular day, he’d rather she showed up than not, but once she’d decided she had to stick with it.

“We’re trying a new format for one of the segments.” It’s a blatant change in the topic of conversation, but if he’s going to insist she say something he was going to have to settle for whatever she gave him.

“Does that bother you?”

“No.” Even if it had, that wasn’t her problem, it was Will’s. She let him worry about the minutia. She was always more worried about the content itself, the way it played to the audience, whoever that happened to be. She hadn’t had to worry about the Lansings, Leona, for a year now, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other concerns.

“It’s a new format.”

She sighs.

“New—”

“Every night is something new.” She can’t help but cut him off before he tries suggesting that new things, new experiences, new ways of looking at things could be scary, stressful.

“You enjoy that.”

“Was that a question?”

“If you want it to be.”

No, she wants to say, but she doesn’t want to have to qualify, explain that she meant she didn’t want it to be a question, not that she didn’t enjoy the change. The change had never bothered her, even the bigger changes, the breaking news, the discarded rundowns. It was all familiar, all safely outside of her purview.

Jack had to know that, which is what bothered her about his asking, the way he’d started insisting she answer for herself. She’d have to ask Will later what he thought of all that, she figured he’d have something to say, about the studio at least, about the fact she didn’t seem bothered when he raised the same questions, but he had never asked with an ulterior motive, was never anything more than curious.

“You’ve been making a lot of changes lately.”

He’s baiting her, she knows that but she’s tempted to reply anyway, let him lead her into some sort of outburst, into saying something rash and ill-advised just for the sake of saying it but she keeps her mouth shut and raises her eyebrows in imitation of Will, waiting.

“Will,” Jack leans into the name and doesn’t follow up.

“What about him?”

“I haven’t seen him in a while.”

She nods once then settles back, knowing now what he’s driving at. “He’s been busy.”

“You haven’t mentioned him.”

“Today?” She’ll play this game, let it draw out to fill the few minutes they have left.

“In the last couple of sessions.”

She knows that’s unusual, even when he’d been working more there had always been their shared time at the office, mentions of shared lunches or an on air quip. “He’s been busy.”

“You haven’t seen him much?”

She hadn’t said that but she lets the assumption stand knowing Jack won’t buy that for a second.

“You mentioned staffing issues, is he looking to—”

“No.” It’s the panic that makes her answer, illogical and uninvited. The staffing issue she’d mentioned had been Jerry, had been the mess he was still insisting on making, dragging Genoa around, unable to let it go. It hadn’t been Will, it hadn’t been Will looking for a new position even if that had been the unspoken implication. “We had a story that— it didn’t pan out. We’ve had some problems. He’s been busy.”

“You’re not worried,” Jack doesn’t finish that question either and she has to stop herself from groaning.

“Will and I are fine. The staff is fine. Work is fine. Is there anything else you’d like to insinuate or are we out of time?”

It’s a little angrier than she means it to be, angry enough that she knows Jack’s going to insist on bringing it up later, but she can’t make herself care, not when she wants so badly to be done.

“I apologize for upsetting you.” The diplomatic response isn’t helping things. She can see that he recognizes that but he doesn’t offer her anything else.

“But you only meant to say,” she prompts but he doesn’t respond to that. “What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not true.” She’s frustrated, only half-interested in reining in her temper.

“Why’s that?”

“You always want something.” That feels like a safe assumption.

“Most people do.”

She makes an irritated noise and balls her hands up to stop herself from getting to her feet. “Is there a reason you’re being so annoying?”

“I wasn’t intending to be.” She waits. “It seems to be a bit of a sensitive topic.”

Don’t ask. She knows that. Don’t ask. She never really wanted to know, always hated knowing. “What?”

“Progress. You’re handling things better.” He says with a smile that beguiles so much more. “We’re out of time for today. We can pick this up on Wednesday.”

*

She’s not surprised that Kara’s the one who calls her, the one who suggests they all go to lunch Jordie and Mac, Kara and Will, the four of them together when Kara drives up to see her family in Connecticut in a couple of weeks. There’s the usual caveats, late breaking news, unforeseen emergencies, but there isn’t the usual hesitation on her part. She knows what this is about, knows what Jordie wants to ask, knows why Kara had insisted on attending the funeral last year.

They’re closer than Katie had ever implied, closer perhaps than she’s noticed, but they weren’t interested in asking Katie’s permission, not that they needed it, not that they needed hers either, but it was sweet in the way that Jordie had always been, drawing them together for the sake of a tradition none of them had ever put any stock in.

She doesn’t mention any of that, doesn’t say anything to Kara, doesn’t let on that she knows what this is really about. She’s seen Jordie once in the last ten years, once in the years before that, but that could change now, might change now and that was enough for her to agree, enough for her to insist on when the news about Boston breaks.

“I’m not cancelling.” It’s the first thing she says when he comes to her with a tentative schedule. They’re in a holding pattern, it’s too early for them to know much of anything, to know how long they’ll be at it, but they know enough to be on the air, to stay on the air, so they’re planning ahead as best they can and she’s not budging.

“It’s you and Sloan.” He reminds her. Elliot’s already on his way to Boston with Maggie, but she doesn’t care.

“I said I’d be there.”

“They’ll—” She narrows her eyes at him and he sighs, knowing better than to continue that particular thought. “I’ll do the best I can, but I can’t promise.”

“I’m not—”

“OK.” He agrees still reluctant, still, she knows, unwilling to make any promises.

*

He hadn’t made any promises, but she’s there against his better judgment. She should have gone home and tried to catch a few hours of sleep. The break is temporary, shorter for her than it is for him, but it’s a break, enough of a break that she’d changed and carefully twisted up her hair, mindful of the fact she wouldn’t have time to sort it out after.

Will hadn’t changed in so much as he’d gone home and fallen asleep then thrown on the first dress shirt and pair of pants he could reach before dashing back out the door. He still looks rumpled, his hair tousled, but he’d managed to remember to grab a blazer, a snappy jacket she’d picked out for him last year so she smiles when he walks in, arm outstretched to wrap around her waist.

“They’re waiting.” He says like maybe she’s forgotten so she shrugs to let him know that it’d been intentional, that she’s been waiting for him. This whole thing would’ve been easier to arrange if he hadn’t needed to leave the office too, but she wanted him here, wanted to share this with him as much as she needed to.

“It’s not,” Jordie says as they walk into the back room, the quiet enclave she’s been making sporadic use of for years.

“It’s not— she’s here. I have to,” he waves to them as Kara gets up to wrap her in a hug, warm and polite, not familiar like the one she offers Will as Jordie continues to try and cut in and then sighs: irritated, then annoyed.

“For fucks sake, Kate, you sound like dad and lord knows we’ve all heard enough of that.”

She feels herself freeze, that one moment of shocked panic before she feels Will’s hand on her arm, heavy, squeezing. Wait. Think. She knows that’s what it means. It’s the moment she needs to draw in another breath before she starts gasping.

No, she wants to say, Jordie stop, Jordie no, take it back, apologize. Harsher, you can’t talk to your sister like that. Impatient, be nice, be fucking— but none of that comes out of her mouth because Will, “Jim wanted me to remind you that,” low and quiet, warm, in her ear, distracting. He didn’t need to remind her of a damn thing, not right now, but he saved them up, these little tidbits.

“I owe him tickets to a show, something,” he considers for a moment, just a heartbeat, “indie, Americana, whichever one is code for ‘has lots of guitars’ the deal is you’re going with him.”

“I— What?” The switch is automatic, it has to be, now, this week. They’re up to their necks in Boston coverage, swimming in it twenty-four hours a day. It’s been on and off like this for days, emotions on, emotions off, news anchor on, off, independent thought, on and then off, everything else buried under exhaustion and coffee and whatever else it is that’s keeping her going.

Will only has to murmur something, echo the static hiss of his voice through her earpiece, if only in her head, and he has her full attention.

“There’s a—” she can’t remember so she shakes her head. “Don mentioned something, when Sloan, there’s some sort of fest, festival. Ask him about it when you see him. I think,”

“Sorry about that.” Jordie’s on his feet now but she’s focused on Will, on the amused quirk of his lips.

“It’s in July if that’s not too late.”

“That’s fine.” There’s a promise there, a smile, and she feels her lips twitch in reply.

“OK.”

*

“Does Katie know?” She hasn’t seen the ring but she knows it’s here somewhere, knows Jordie’s waiting through the salad and most of the entree for the right moment to bring it up but she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the call, about whatever snide comment Katie had made about her presence.

“Mac.” Will presses gently, warning her off either from spoiling the surprise or from pressing the issue, possibly both given the mood they’re in: tired, a little edgy, somewhat distracted from the normal social niceties.

“Know what?” Kara sounds genuinely confused but Jordie’s gaze slides away for a moment, not guilty but considering, careful.

“I wanted to talk to you first.”

“You should talk to Katie.” She says it to Will, turning toward him earnestly although she isn’t sure why. He’s the last person she’ll be able to convince that that’s what she wants. She wasn’t even sure she could convince herself, but it felt right, it felt too much like giving something away, too much away, if she didn’t say something, if she didn’t insist.

“She— there’s so much she never—”

“Mac.” Will cuts her off gently, a little remorsefully and she stops, stops and looks at him because she doesn’t like that tone; it terrifies her. “This is Jordie’s lunch.”

“Yes,” she says and then “yes,” again, softer, quieter, aching because it was Jordie’s lunch. It was about him, what he wanted, what he’d asked for.

“I’m sorry.” She says it to her hands, to the fingers pressed hard against one another in her lap and then looks up, repentant, at Jordie who’s smiling at her with the fondness he’s always had for her.

“You’re such a mother hen.” He laughs a little when he says it and she forces a smile, reaching desperately for Will’s hand under the table. “Always looking out for us.”

Kara smiles too and Will squeezes her hand. Somewhere out in the main room someone clinks a bunch of glassware together.

*

“We’re looking at dates in August.” Jordie tells her not at all bashful, despite the quite pleased expression Kara’s wearing. “Kara really likes sunflowers and we like the idea of a summer wedding. Plus I promised mom.”

He pauses when Mac swallows to stop herself from choking, her fork dropping with a dull clink onto her plate.

“She wanted a June bride, family tradition.” Jordie’s smile turns soft. “She always wanted that for you.”

“Yeah.” There isn’t anything she can say to that, anything she can say past the lump in her throat, because she’d always wanted that, always dreamed of that, one of the only parts of her family she’d hung on to.

“You should—” It’s a quiet aching. She’s looking at her knuckles, pale white in her lap. It’s not an offer she wants to make but it’s one she knows she should.

“It’s June brides not June grooms. Katie had July. Sammy can have September if he wants it. June’s always been yours.”

“I— That’s—” she tries again and then sighs.

“It’s the one thing mom could give you.”

Rationally she knows he means it’s something he can give her, one little thing, that it doesn’t have anything to do with their mom, dead now for well over a decade, but with his sense of gratitude, an acknowledgement of what she’d been able to give him. She knows that, but there’s a lump in her throat and an ache in her head, memories of a small boy with pudgy fingers and a smiling face at three, five, seven, nine on the day she’d left, sneaking out of bed to say goodbye while the rest of the house had slept, peaceful only in their imaginations.

She hadn’t seen him for ten years after that. In so many ways he was still that gangly awkward kid. He’d only ever seen what she’d lost, but she’d hoped she’d become more than that to him somehow, although now she sees that she hasn’t, that she couldn’t have and she wonders if she’d lost him too, not today, but on that long ago morning, lost him the same way she’d lost her mom: to protect them, to protect herself.

“Have you thought about venues?” She looks up to ask Kara who smiles with a shake of her head.

“Most of my family’s in Connecticut. Jordie says it’s up to me, so,” she shrugs faintly.

*

She’d made it through the afternoon, through the evening, through hours and hours of air time before it starts to wear her down, before she gets tired and she starts to feel like things are falling apart, like the voices in her head, the anxieties and the insecurities are no longer whispering, but screaming.

She takes his keys. She knows she shouldn’t, but he’d left them on his desk. He won’t be off the air for hours and she doesn’t want to be alone. She should ask but she can’t, won’t. It’s an easier impulse to give into, one that feels less terrifying than the rest. She takes his keys and she doesn’t ask but she thinks it might be OK.

She’s not OK. It’s more exhaustion than anything, mental and physical, she knows that, knows it shouldn’t feel this terrifying but it does. It terrifies her in the way it makes her itch, tempts her toward the self-destructive.

She hasn’t been back here, hasn’t seen the space without him in it, but she still feels him here in the way she never could in her apartment, not after he’d left, but here it feels like him, smells like him, his shower warm, shrouded in the smell of his shampoo, his sheets soft, caressing.

She’d intended to sleep for a while, had longed for the oblivion of sleep, but she hadn’t thought it would come so swiftly, so completely, so for a moment, when she wakes to the sound of his coffee maker sputtering, she isn’t sure what’s happening.

She leaves his bed, leaves the coffee, locks the door behind her. This isn’t OK. She’s not OK, but that doesn’t feel so bad.

She still can’t go back to her apartment, she won’t, and the gym isn’t open. The office right now isn’t a refuge. It isn’t allowed to be. She needed breaks even Jim would remind her of that, offer, possibly she thinks, his couch but she can’t remember where he’s supposed to be, can’t remember if he’ll be sleeping so she doesn’t call.

She texts Jack instead, jamming her fingers into the buttons, forming words that feel too muddled and confused outside the confines of her head, but she presses send all the same walking north on Eighth, the street dark, the sun not yet rising.

Her phone buzzes once, twice and she answers, sighs.

“If you hurry there may still be a muffin left.”

She groans, hangs up, turns east.

*

She doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t ask, just hands her what she assumes was meant to be his breakfast and gestures toward the couch. She sits on the floor with her back against its front munching carefully. 

She doesn’t feel like talking. She’d wanted him to say something, but she isn’t really in the mood to listen either.

“What happened?” He asks as she picks the last of the crumbs from the paper wrapper. It’s an innocuous question, one she can ignore if she wants. This definitely wasn’t a session, definitely wasn’t meant to be anything other than a safe place to sit for an hour on a Friday morning before she went into work so she doesn’t have to answer but she does, in a way.

“Will’s going to be pissed.”

“You sound pretty sure about that.”

She shrugs, folding the wrapper into quarters. “He should be calling in—” she stops to glance at her phone. “Hi, Will.”

“Hey Mac, you seen my keys?” He’s out on the street. She can hear the early morning traffic around him, picking up now that rush hour’s started.

“Yeah.”

“OK.”

“I have them.”

“Should I swing by your place and pick them up?”

She pauses long enough to glance over at Jack who’s gone back to whatever paperwork he’s been making his way through. “I’m at Jack’s.”

“Should I,” he considers this.

“Yeah.” She says not entirely sure that it’s true. It’s not as if she needs a witness to whatever Will is going to say, he’s going to be pissed but she knows he’s not going to be unreasonable about it. She’d apologize and they’d move on.

*

“I’m sorry.” She says almost before he has a chance to say hello. She knows it makes her sound nervous, jumping the gun, but she’s realized she doesn’t have a way to explain why she’d taken his keys, not when she wasn’t sure why herself. “I should have asked. I should have—”

“Mac.” He says quietly and she stops. Quiet Will was hardly ever a bad thing, if he was angry he let her know, but it’d always unsettled her the way he could blunt the edges of his emotions, protect her from them even when she knew she didn’t deserve the consideration.

“I’m not mad.” He gives her a look, pressing a little because there’s not a chance in hell she’s going to believe that and he seems to know it. “I was a little worried when you weren’t where I thought you would be. One of the guys downstairs let me in. The door’s easy to jimmy if you forget to lock the deadbolt.” He continues with enough humor that she knows he’s thinking of all the times he’s told her to lock her own door, to put the chain on when she wasn’t expecting him, although she hardly bothered with either when she was home alone. She’d been getting better about it though, since she’d noticed the self-destructive undertones to her reasoning; it wasn’t that she felt safe at home, although she did now, it was that for the longest time she hadn’t cared, hadn’t seen the risk as a risk but as a sort of uncontrollable inevitability.

“I didn’t make the bed either.” She says softly, a little cautiously and he laughs at that, a full throated chuckle that makes her smile too.

“You don’t have to ask.” He says although she knows she won’t do it again. “But a note would’ve been nice.”


	7. Chapter 7

She lets Rebecca do most of the talking, most of the squabbling with Will. They’re running the story. Rebecca will do her job, Neal will get a slap on the wrist and things will go back to normal. That’s not to say they don’t have a lot to do first, a lot of hurdles to clear, precautions to take. None of this is making it on air any time soon but she doesn’t mention that either, so when Charlie disappears upstairs, when he doesn’t reappear, she excuses herself and slips into the conference room, leaning back against the door she’d pressed closed behind her.

“Hello, Blair.”

She’s not expecting a pleasant greeting, Blair was all snark and snarl with most people, but she’s civil enough, offering Mac a clearly forced smile.

“My dad says hello.”

“I’m sorry I missed him in the Hamptons last night. News.” Mac shrugs conversationally stepping over to slide into a seat she knows Blair isn’t about to offer.

“I don’t know why the fuck he likes you.” She’s bored, annoyed by the whole spectacle, by Charlie, and Reese, and Mac assumes, by the spectre of Leona.

“I get paid seven million dollars a year. I donate a quarter of that. He’d rather I donate it to him.”

“My father—”

“Has his hobbies. Did he find a buyer for that Richter piece? It’s beautiful.”

“Out of your price range?” Blair seems to relish in that even though Mac knows she’s never understood her father’s taste for abstract art.

“It wasn’t worth cashing in my options.”

“You don’t have—” Randy seems finally to be paying attention.

“You’ve been doing some reading.”

“Fuck.”

Mac raises her eyebrows and waits, but when Blair doesn’t seem to have anything else to say she smiles slyly. “A message in a bottle. You always were fond of them, although perhaps this one was a little too subtle.”

“You.”

“It’s best not to bluff before you’ve done your research. What percentage of AWM stock is publicly held? Ten percent if I’m not mistaken and how much of that is up for sale?” Mac pauses for a moment to smile conversationally. “Being generous let’s say seventy percent, seventy percent of the total offering. Savannah told you they’d managed to buy sixty percent. When did you realize that wouldn’t be enough?”

Reese who’s been silent up until now opens his mouth but she shakes her head, shooting Charlie a look so he doesn’t get any bright ideas and butt in before she can finish.

“The pool isn’t ten percent, six point one percent is. You made an assumption. The wrong one. They bought sixty percent of the six point one percent available. Savannah owns less than four percent of AWM’s stock. That’s not enough.”

“You can’t possibly know for sure. You can’t possibly own—” Blair’s protesting before she’s given herself a moment to think.

“Four percent of AWM. That’s three million dollars, almost exactly as of last night. Less than half of my annual salary. That doesn’t sound impossible.”

“That’s a stupid,” Blair glares at her, unable to finish her sentence. It was a bad investment strategy. Mac had seen worse, but she knows what she means. It wouldn’t matter that she’d had her all her eggs in one basket from day one, from the day Charlie had offered her a job. She should have diversified, spread out the risk, even if the risk now was her job and the family Will had built for them all.

“That may be, but this company isn’t for sale, unless of course you’re still interested in settling up. Leona’s outside; she’s willing to buy you out, on her terms of course. It’ll be less than what you were planning on asking for, but you should still be able to afford the giant party you’re planning for next week.

*

She’d forgotten, the recognition of the fact slams into her when she sees them on the sidewalk, Jordie and Kara arm in arm carefully looking for numbers on buildings as they pass.

“Up this way one more.” Will calls out to them and they stop to laugh as she forces a smile back onto her face.

She’d asked Neal to tell her. He’d been rash, acted too quickly, an impulse she hadn’t questioned although it had meant there wasn’t anything she could do to help him. He’d gotten himself into a mess when he’d called. They’d gotten him a lawyer, done everything they should have done but warn him to be careful. She’s responsible for that; she’d felt responsible for that, felt too helpless not to do something, so he’d told her, of course he’d told her and so she’d known, known something she shouldn’t have when she’d stepped into her office several paces in front of Molly as she’d asked, “is there anything I need to know?”

“No.” Will had been suddenly antagonistic, a little defiant.

She’d been the one protesting earlier, not loudly, but consistently enough that he’d been shooting her looks the entire time. She’d cooperated. She’d known better than to not, but she hadn’t been happy about it, hadn’t been happy with the way they were bending the rules, bending the law, and she hadn’t been about to keep her mouth shut about that.

She was keeping her mouth shut now though because she knows he knows. Somehow he knows. Neal couldn’t have told him, Neal was gone, but he’d known, he’d had a feeling and he hadn’t been about to let her open her mouth.

“Don’t ever say what I think you’re about to say.” He’d whispered in her ear, pressed close when they’d reached the street, stepped toward the curb to hail a cab.

He’d known and she hadn’t said anything, hadn’t told him she didn’t know what he meant because there was a reckoning coming, another reminder that she’d never be free of her self-destructive impulses even if only in his head. She hated that, hated him for it even if he was right, so she’s a little pissed, a little gutted, and absolutely not in the mood to try and explain herself.

She’s in a mood and her smile’s a fake but it grows a little more real when she sees George leaning against the panel beside the buzzers to her building.

“You said eight thirty.” He holds up a pair of bags, heavy she assumes given the way the handles have stretched.

“I’m sorry.” She shakes her head a little, apologizing as she steps closer, trading air kisses and a laugh.

“Conejita has a new time. If you—”

“Detour.” She announces smiling, this time for real, thankful both for the distraction and the joy she knows it’ll bring. “I need to see a girl about some stairs.”

“Mac.” It’s Will trying to tell her that this, whatever it is, can wait, but she hears Jordie chuckle as she crosses the street, stopping a few buildings up as George jogs over empty handed.

“Yo chica, la linda—” He stops, laughs and shoves his cell back in his pocket as Mac hears the familiar joyous shriek and accompanying clattering before Flora appears bouncing before her.

“The lady needs shoes.” George says by way of reminder and Mac almost laughs again, kicking off her heels and digging around in her purse for the flats she kept folded and tucked away. They weren’t the best to run in, but she wasn’t aiming to win, she hardly ever won, that was the point.

“OK. OK.” Flora’s still bouncing, waiting as George leans into the door so Mac can duck inside.

“On your mark.” George teases as Mac grins, rolling her head across her shoulders. “Get set.”

It’s Flora that yells, “go!”, as she rockets up the stairs Mac close behind, up the stairs and past the first landing and then the second. When the reach the top she and Flora stand panting, grinning. Flora glowing with pride, Mac with amusement.

“Tell your abuelita I said hi.” Mac says after a deliberately sharp exhale. “And thank your mom for the food. I have guests so I can’t stay.”

“George wasn’t blowing smoke.” Flora confirms and Mac laughs.

“No, no he wasn’t. You’re getting fast.”

“I practice.”

“That’s good.” Mac smiles at her again, before raising a hand in a wave. “I’ll stop by and see you all next week.” She promises starting back down the stairs, slower but with the same quick even step.

“She beat you.” George is on the sidewalk watching her pause by the door with a shit eating grin.

“Lightening feet.” She exhales with a nod. “Have you tried telling her to stop growing?”

“You think she listens to me?”

“Sounds familiar.” It’s Will, amused, the bags of food held in his hand. “Should we head inside?”

*

All the back and forth was wearing her out, DC to New York and back again, Connecticut on the weekends so she could get away, so she could run, run until every part of her burned like her lungs, so she could get away from the paparazzi and the pull of the office: check the story, check the story, check the story.

They had enough. Will hadn’t told her that but she’d seen the look on his face that night in April before they’d gone on air without the story and she’d known but he’d said to trust him and she did, she was too worn out not to. They had enough, but they were waiting.

Leverage. The story was leverage. Leverage. She knew the guy who owned the estate. She’d offered to get them a deal, testing the waters. Kara had been so in love with the place before she’d even gotten out of the car. Let me pay for it. I need to get you two a wedding gift. Leverage.

She’d asked Kara first, Kara who had told her she’d have to talk to Jordie, that Jordie wouldn’t mind her offering, but she’d have to talk to him.

Nothing had been decided. It’s the beginning of June and she’s sweating under the pressure, the oppressive heat of the sun.

She hasn’t seen Will outside of work since news of the first subpoena had broke in April. She won’t risk compromising their case, feeding the tabloids. She hasn’t seen him much, but he’s here for the weekend, somewhere, away from her, avoiding her. She’d been needling him, quiet seemingly innocuous barbs. There’s a lot that can be said in an hour and a half when you’re stuck elbow to elbow on a plane with no inflight service because the clouds hadn’t been able to keep to themselves.

Turbulence. She huffs out another breath and breaks through the last of the trees. It’s not much of a view, she’s not up much higher than the main part of the estate, she’d gone down before she’d gone up, but the climb had been steep enough to leave her a little winded.

She’d come back through later in the day when it cooled off a bit, right before the sun started to go down. She knew better than to make the run in the near dark with Will around. There were too many trees, too many possible missteps for him not to insist against it and she couldn’t blame him for that even if she had a headlamp, even if she’d made the run several times in the dead of night. The estate had close to two hundred rooms but no gym, no treadmill.

The two rooms she had, the two rooms and the attached day room and kitchenette, weren’t quite large enough to accomodate one if she’d been tempted to buy one, but she hadn’t been, hadn’t considered it. She liked the hilly trails, preferred them late in the day even if mornings would be better, cooler. She’s stopped even trying to drag herself out of bed in the morning. That was what Will and his incessant phone calls were for. She never needed the extra hours then, in the daylight, with the whole world watching.

*

“Hello?”

She’s out of the shower, damp haired in a flannel shirt and a nearly invisible pair of shorts considering the shirt must originally have been one of Will’s.

“Hey Kara.”

“Can I get a hand?”

And that’s how it starts. The simple directions, one tiny step at a time. It’s not could you set the table. It’s can you find us a couple of plates. Can you set them on the table. How about glasses; you can leave them on the counter. One step and then another and Mac follows along, mixes greens and juices lemons without any consideration to what they’re actually doing, building a lunch for the three of them. She loses herself in the tasks, settles into a sort of holding pattern so that by the time the table is set, laid with the fruits of their labor, she feels the first sort of true peace she’s felt in what could be months.

“Jordie’s coming up later. Maybe.” Kara offers passing by with a pitcher of water. “He’s not so interested in the wedding details. He’s happy if I’m happy that sort of thing.”

It’s a shocking jolt of reality but the peace still lingers for a moment as Mac finishes straightening a table setting. She’d wanted to see Jordie, she missed him, wanted the distraction and she’s edgy at the thought of spending too much time with Will in close quarters, afraid of what she might say, the feelings that might seep out.

*

She’s up throwing stones in the pond. This time of year it’s more puddle than proper body of water, but the surface still ripples and the stones she’s throwing fall silently to the bottom so she isn’t too concerned about the technicalities, not when she’s so desperately in need of something to take the edge off, a distraction.

She watches a stone skip across the surface of the water, once, twice, a third time and then fall. There isn’t much more room than that, but she doesn’t care about that either. She chucks another stone in and watches the water ripple, behind her Jordie laughs, skips another stone. When she turns toward him he holds one out to her, a smooth stone, a skipping stone, not the rounded pebbles she’s been chucking.

She’s tempted not to take it. She doesn’t mind him up here, he probably needed a break after being dragged around all afternoon by Kara, through the chapel and the outbuildings, through the garden, but there’s a reason she’s tempted to throw the stones in wholesale and go for another run. There’s a reason, but she takes the stone, skips it just once and chucks in another pebble.

“Do it right.” He’s right behind her now, his fingers folding over hers as he presses another stone against her palm.

She sighs, but does as he asks, watches the stone skip in perfect arcs.

“Remember when you taught me how to do that?”

“Yeah.” She laughs a little remembering. “You wouldn’t let me go home until you had it down cold.”

“You taught me so much.” He offers her a smile when she turns to glance back at him. “I didn’t realize how much until recently— Kara and I were talking, you know so and so taught me this, and that, and it came up. It seemed so silly at the time, like some sort of hypothetical, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

He’s quiet for a moment and she turns toward him again, away from the pond.

“You were the one who taught me what it meant to love someone.”

“Jordie.” She says automatically, almost pleading.

“And I,” he pauses for a moment to take a breath. “It kills me to think you never had that.”

“Mom—”

“God, Mac,” he says softly, not angry but sad. “She tried. I know she did but—”

“Jordie, no,” she says knowing she won’t sway him. He’s so sure about this.

“If she— She would have left him. She should have left him the first time.”

“God, Jordie.” She says a little too loudly, angry at the way the words burn in the back of her throat. “She was scared.”

“So were you.”

“I was a stupid kid.”

“You were a saint.”

“No.” She shakes her head turning away. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want this conversation and she doesn’t want these feelings but she doesn’t want him to go. She’d never been able to figure out how to make those two things go together.

“I never asked you to protect me, but you did. You used to beg her to wake up to protect herself, protect you but she never did.”

“No,” it’s a whisper now. Her eyes pressed shut, she’s shaking her head hard enough that she feels unsteady and her neck aches.

“I used to think they were nightmares.” He says gently, suddenly quiet too as the tears start to slip down her cheeks. “I used to think they couldn’t be real, but they were, weren’t they, the memories. I found a box of court documents up in the attic before we sold the house.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t— I’m not,” she swallows to stop from choking. “It wasn’t like that.”

“She should have—”

“No.” She says it fiercely, resolutely. “Don’t say that. Don’t—”

“She should have.”

“Jordie, god dammit. None of us would be here.”

“After then.” He says it casually, like time, like that particular distinction is irrelevant.

“No.” She’s so sure of that, so sure she can’t begin to contemplate what that would have been like, so sure everything will fall apart if she starts to wish for what she could never have.

“She should have told him to go to hell before he kicked you out of—”

“It wasn’t like—”

“And Katie.”

“Jordie.”

“You loved me more than anyone and he took—”

“He didn’t.” She stops to draw in a breath, the air trembling in her lungs. “I left because— but he didn’t make me go. I was sixteen and out of high school. Katie was about to implode. Mom didn’t know what to do with her.”

“Because of him. Because of him.” He repeats when she tries to protest. “He fucked us all up and she didn’t save us from that.”

“She tried. I tried.” The second admission is softer.

“You shouldn’t have had to.”

“No kid should have to, no one should have to. That wasn’t her fault. She didn’t throw herself down the stairs.”

She stops, presses a hand to her mouth and presses her eyes shut again. He hadn’t known about that, of course he hadn’t known about that. She’d gotten so caught up. She’d gotten caught up and forgotten.

“When was that?”

“It doesn’t, it’s not.” She wants him to stop asking, wants so desperately for him to stop asking. She’s had the same conversation, gone around and around with Katie looking for answers, excuses, a reason, any reason, but this is worse, this hurts, this hurts more because he hadn’t known, would never have known if she’d taken on more responsibility.

“You can’t save me from something that’s already happened.”

It’s so gentle she almost looks at him, opens her eyes and looks at the longing in his, but he’s standing so close to her, close enough to touch so she turns away, lays her hands on her own arms.

“I know you never wanted me to know. I tried to get Katie to tell me.” He chuckles, dry and humorless. “She wasn’t interested in having that fight with you. She said it’s the one thing that could get her disowned.”

“If you really want to know ask Will.” It’s a cop out she knows that. She doesn’t have a clue what Will will say, has no idea if Jordie would even ask, if this will all blow back in her face but she doesn’t care.

“He really loves you doesn’t he?”

“Yeah.” She scuffs her toe in the dirt and takes a deep breath trying to steady herself again. This isn’t safe ground, but it feels safer, safe enough.

“It sounds like maybe you think that he shouldn’t.”

“No it’s, I never understood why.”

“There doesn’t need to be a reason.”

“It’s better when there is.”

“Because?”

“Less surprises.”

He seems startled by her answer, almost confused by it, like life was only meant to be surprises, vast swaths of unknown things.

“Because with a reason there’s expectation.” Jordie smiles, pleased with himself for figuring that out.

She shrugs.

“You’re worried Will,” he doesn’t finish the sentiment but he doesn’t have to.

“I— He won’t. It doesn’t matter what I,” she shakes her head.

“Stubborn ass?”

“Yeah.” She smiles despite the way her stomach aches.

Don’t be a saint. He’d told her that in the car driving up here. She’d told him she wasn’t, told him she’d never been, but he’d disagreed, said she tried, kept trying. She’d ignored him, focused on the road and the mile markers, the signs for exits she’d never taken.

You don’t have to do it all yourself. She knew that’s what he meant, but he wouldn’t say that. She’d spent so long in the past not listening, not listening the way he’d wanted her to, so he poked at her with metaphors, with words sharper than he knew.

“It’s really hard to,” she sighs in one giant rush of air.

“To trust yourself.” Jordie looks past her then down at his shoes, at the cloud of dust they’ve been passing back and forth scuffing the dirt. “Sometimes I wake up terrified that I’m going to hurt Kara, like there’s another person living in my head waiting to come out; it sounds like him, like the shit Kate says when she gets mad and it’s terrifying.”

You would never. That’s what she wants to say to him, what she should say to him, but it’s what he would say to her and she knows he’d be wrong, so wrong, because she’d said those things, done things— 

“The devil with a voice like whiskey.”

“Yeah.” Jordie’s chuckle is a bitter sound. “Something like that.”

*

They have dinner and she disappears again out into the fields, through the trees moving, always moving, trying to keep the inside of her head quiet.

It was easier in a way, coping, it wasn’t a constant overwhelming onslaught of surprises, but it was still overwhelming. They were all overwhelmed, there was more to deal with and no way to control the outcome, no way to control any of it. She had to weather the storm and she had to do it alone.

Will would argue against that, but he’d have to admit to an extent that she was right. He may have dragged the others into it to protect her, but she would’ve had to limit contact with them eventually to protect them. She couldn’t tell them things they weren’t supposed to know if she never saw them, if they never had the time.

Rebecca of course had insisted they were being overly cautious, and from a legal point of view Mac could almost agree, but it wasn’t just Rosenthal she was worried about. He was an ass, but he had some legal and moral constraints, the confines of his job. The tabloids, the paparazzi in particular were less restrained.

Rosenthal couldn’t stake out her apartment, but a guy getting paid a couple hundred bucks could sit there all night, and while it wasn’t admissible, while Rebecca could object, he could at the very least use it to raise the spectre of doubt, and that’s all he’d need. It’d be more than enough, if they thought she was lying, if she might be lying. The truth might be relative, but she knew he, and most people, didn’t care about that.

*

She comes back to find Will on the couch, one of her old law books open on his knee.

“They’ll be back in a minute.” He promises as she passes and she nods, heading toward the bedroom to find a sweater to pull on.

She lingers there, waiting till she hears them come back, waiting until she hears boxes being slid onto shelves, and bottles clinking in the refrigerator before she pokes her head out to see what’s going on. 

“Sorry we took so long.” Kara smiles at her. “Jordie had to pick up a couple of things. Who knew Ovaltine was so hard to find.

“Jordie, You didn’t.” She says, already trying not to smile despite her previously precarious mood. “Jordie.” She insists but he doesn’t reply only grins that grin at her, the shy mischievous one that looks shy only in comparison to the wolfish grin he gives her when she raises her eyebrows at him, warning.

“Jordie.”

“I know it was a thousand years ago but you won the bet, by a landslide.” He tacks on, “I owe you a glass of chocolate milk.”

“He even bought a spoon. It had to be the proper size.” Kara chimes in with a bright laugh at whatever Will had said under his breath.

“Get yourself a glass.” She wasn’t about to win this argument, rules were rules even if they were thirty years old and ridiculous in the way only childhood rules could be, but she could compromise.

“That’s not how this work.”

“Get—” She says, but she doesn’t finish, sliding around the corner of the table toward him. He’s always had good reflexes, but he had given into the easier impulse, held whatever she had wanted over his head, even if that, more than anything, was futile. They were both taller now, he was tall enough that that might have worked, but he’s gotten smarter, can think faster and the bottle of syrup skids along the floor under the table before she can grab it.

She hears it thunk against the wall under the couch as she turns. She jumps to miss the edge of the table and then slides, reaching to grab the bottle but Jordie’s only a step behind her laughing as she shrieks.

He’d weighted half as much as she had the last time they’d done this, rolled and laughed, giggled as she tried to fight him off. He was bigger than her now, taller and heavier, but that wasn’t a problem, wasn’t the problem, it never had been.

She reaches and his hand slides up, tickling. She swats it away and reaches again. She shrieks and twists and he laughs. She rolls over, trying to inch forward and he pulls her back, so she turns again, trying to kick at him but he’s too close, she can’t stop laughing, can’t catch her breath.

“You monster.” She gasps but he only laughs, tickling her until she shrieks again. Back and forth they go until she can’t squirm away fast enough to stop the tickling from becoming unbearable.

“Uncle,” she gasps, “uncle,” and he stops, sitting back on his heels as her arms fall to her sides.

“God.” She huffs out a couple of deep breaths greedy for the oxygen then dizzy from it, holding steady to Will’s arm when he reaches down to pull her to her feet.

He’s smiling, eyes lit up in a way that says he’s happy she’s happy as he wipes the dust from the back of her shirt, from the seat of her pants. It’s a deliberate set of movements, just brisk enough for their intended purpose, but softer than they need to be. He wants to touch her, to be close to her. It’s been months, weeks since they’ve been this close, this intimate.

She swallows and shakes her head to clear it.

“I have dust bunnies in my hair.” It’s a disingenuous complaint, but it does its job, no one questions why she disappears, shuffling off to stand under the shower spray, hair soaked, shoulders shaking, her face streaked with tears.

*

She wakes with the sudden ache of awareness, the panicked recognition that he’d fallen into bed beside her, fallen asleep like he had so many times before.

She feels her foot connect with his shin. It’s accidental more than intentional, but the second time she kicks harder, deliberate.

He grunts.

She kicks again.

“What?”

“Go.”

“Mac?”

She sets her foot against his leg and presses. His arm slips up so he can brace himself against the mattress with a sigh. “Going, going. I’m going.” He relents, repeats himself until she yanks the blanket he’d dislodged in his shuffling back over her shoulder, the side of her face still pressed into a pillow.

*

He’s in the kitchen when she gets up, in the kitchenette tucked along one wall. He wasn’t supposed to be there. She’d told him to go, but he only ever went as far as she pushed him. She could chase him out but he’d stop walking the moment she stopped following him.

She can’t deal with that today, with the pushing and the shoving, with the look in his eyes and the fake smile she’ll keep plastered on her face.

“Breakfast?” He asks but she pretends not to hear him.

She’s not dressed for a run. She’d pulled on a sweatshirt, her shorts would hold up well enough, but she doesn’t have her sneakers, they’re back in the bedroom somewhere so she settles for her sandals, the old worn pair by the door and heads out to the car, yanking open the passenger door to dig through through the cup holder, through the pile of stuff Will had emptied from his pockets during the drive.

“God, I wish you were here.” She’s out by the tree line when she calls Frank, the first stick of cinnamon gum stinging sharp in her mouth.

“Need a smoke?” It wasn’t often that she called him like this, spontaneously, out of the blue, so he already knows that she does. “I could smoke one for both of us.”

“Not too early?” She asks and she can almost hear him shrug. Too early was code for Katie would notice but he knew that too. 

“There’s enough empty parking lots in this city.”

“I’d say.” She laughs a little at that, remembering the smattering of parking lots they’d hung out in, Katie at home with their mom while Mac ‘had a break.’ The break was always with Frank, almost always a smoke break. He’d drive around for a while and then they’d sit somewhere, smoke, sometimes she’d talk, sometimes she’d cry.

She’d cried more in the beginning, before she’d gotten over the shock, the disappointment of hoping she’d finally get to know her mom. It’d been ten years by that point since she’d left for Lincoln and then New York, ten years since she’d heard anything from her. It’d been so long she’d forgotten what her voice sounded like. In the beginning the thought of losing that had been too much to bear, but even then that had been a lie, because it wasn’t her voice, the voice of her mother, but the voice of a stranger, so she’d spent a couple of afternoons smoking and crying, then she’d gotten over it.

“Maybe that’s the trick.”

“What?”

“The empty parking lots.”

“I’ve never known an empty parking lot to fix anything.”

“They fix a lot of things, like privacy and,” she considers, then snorts as Frank laughs.

“That’s code for mischief, which solves nothing.”

“Boredom.”

“Possibly.”

“Although I doubt it’d do anything for you ‘Ms. I didn’t just put you on speaker so I could climb a tree’.”

She stops to wedge her foot against the trunk along the top of a branch. “How can you tell?”

“Snap crackle pop.”

“It’s fine. I’m five feet off the ground.”

“Don’t drop me.”

“No giving Frank a heart attack, right.” 

She hoists herself up a few more feet and then stops to sit with her feet dangling, her phone held back to her ear.

“If you do go out, swing by that overpass. Send me a photo.”

“You want one with the graffiti or should I try and make it look romantic?”

“Whatever you’re in the mood for.”

“I’ll spare you the literal garbage. I hear you’ve had enough of that.”

“Please tell me you haven’t started reading the tabloids.”

Frank laughs at that. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

*

She stays in the tree for a while, settles in, but eventually the pull to keep moving wins out and she climbs down, wanders into the trees, cuts over to a path that leads through a field, up a small hill.

She has her head down, eyes trained on a spot a few feet ahead, letting her mind empty out, her body go through the motions step after step until she spots the heels of a pair of shoes, a pair of boots flecked with dried mud.

She’s about to turn away, step back but her foot slides on a bit of gravel and Kara turns. “Hey.”

“I wasn’t expecting,” Mac cuts herself off and Kara smiles.

“Tens of acres and we all seem to end up in the same place.”

“Where’s Jordie?”

Kara tips her head to the side, toward the bottom of the embankment she’s standing at the edge of and Mac steps over to peer down.

“There’s a—” Kara starts but Mac’s already taken a step, started down. It’s more of a controlled slide than a graceful descent but she’s not struggling to keep her feet.

“Both of you.” She can hear Kara laughing. “There’s a path downstream.”

“Huh.” Mac shakes her head having spotted the thin line of compacted dirt in the direction Kara had indicated. “That’s nice.”

“That’s what I said.”

Jordie hasn’t turned from the stream bed, but his posture has shifted. He’d noticed her and seems to be pleased she’d shown up.

“Catch anything?”

“Not yet. Not really expecting to.”

“Why not?” She steps over watching the way his fingers work the line. “They nibbling?”

“Some.” He turns and holds the line out to her, the solid spool wrapped with line, the hook still dripping water.

She fits a bit of bait on, a scrap of meat leftover from the previous night’s dinner then checks behind her before spinning the line, letting it swing before casting it. She tugs hard against the current, lets it sink, but keeps the line tight, tighter when she feels the first of several nibbles.

“They’re biting.” She agrees, stepping closer to where Jordie’s standing to hand him the line. “You’ll get something.”

He isn’t expecting that, isn’t expecting her to insist he give it a go, but he takes the line, lets it slip along his palm.

“Cameron teach you?” She asks watching the stream. Holding the line, even one on a pole would always give her the best indication of what was going on but she could watch the current, watch the way Jordie moved and make some guesses.

“Tried to.” Jordie shrugs and for a moment the slack in the line is taken up by the motion.

Mac had been lucky in that regard she knew that, being the black sheep, the unwanted one meant her time with Cameron and his wife, Mrs. Cameron, often went unnoticed, although when it didn’t the scrutiny, the fury was often swift and especially harsh.

“Keep the line tight.” She reminds him, “you’re better off taking it up too fast and having to cast again. If something bites you need to get the hook in before it makes off with the bait.”

“Bandit fish.” Kara’s joined them on the bank. “Never heard of those.”

Jordie who had been frowning at the water grins. “Best kind of breakfast. You wait and see.”

*

They have a fight in the car, as much of a fight as they ever have, as she ever lets them have because she isn’t interested in hearing how much he misses her even if she misses him too, even if they both know it’s killing her, because there isn’t anything either of them can do about it and admitting that she’s terrified: of missing him, of realizing just how much she misses him, how much that hurts, how much she wants him, of the possibility that maybe, just maybe she’s losing him and it’s not her fault.

She hadn’t started it but she can’t stop it either, can’t save them either, so she doesn’t want to talk about it even if he insists on bringing it up over and over again for an hour until she’s furious with him. Furious at him for not shutting up, for asking her to trust him, for being trustworthy, for not letting her do things her way, even if she knows she really shouldn’t anyway.

*

He lets a couple of days pass, she’ll give him that, but she’s still pissed, still trying to convince him to go because he shouldn’t have shown up in the first place. She shouldn’t have heard his key in the lock as she’d been slipping into her pajamas.

“I’m here.” He says and she knows what he means, that whatever damage was done had already been done. If someone was waiting outside with a camera, if someone was going to muddy the waters with their alleged affair or a late night conspiracy, once was enough, although as Will had argued in the past even that wasn’t strictly necessary.

“If Rosenthal—”

“Wanted to drag our personal lives into court don’t you think he would have already?”

“He’s running out of patience.”

“Then he can let it drop.”

“Or start throwing people in jail.”

“No one’s going to jail. He can’t play ennie meanie miene mo, and incarcerating the five of us would be impractical at best.”

“Which is why it’s entirely possible—”

“No.”

“Will.” She’s exasperated now, a little angry that he’s not taking this more seriously, but she’d always been more worried than he was and while he’d been respectful of that, his reluctance to admit that she might not be worried needlessly chaffed.

“That’s not—”

“I’m not lying under oath and I am not answering questions—”

“I know.” He cuts her off gently. “I know and I’m sorry I’m the asshole who asked you to trust me and then by proxy Jim and Sloan and Don. I’m not sorry I wouldn’t let you get thrown in jail, but I am sorry I got us into this mess indirectly because we can’t keep living like this, like we didn’t have lives before this, like we don’t deserve to have them now. Colleagues are allowed to socialize after hours. I’m only staying until eleven.” He heads off her protest. “I’m an ass, but I’m an ass who misses you. Let me have an hour, please.”

It’s a dangerous precedent, an hour would become two too quickly, once a week would become twice, would become tomorrow and the next day. She knew that, but she lets him stay because they’ve been having the same argument for weeks and she’s tired of repeating herself, of making the same argument he’d never buy into. He knows she’s worried, about them, about the case and the story, the integrity of it all, but he’s more worried about her and that would always win in the end.

An hour did become two, but never more than three and never every night. He’d stay until she crawled into bed, sometimes until she fell asleep but she always woke up alone in a cold bed, with the same groceries in the fridge that she’d bought herself. He wasn’t hanging around, stopping by on weekends, but he was there and that helped. She hated to admit that, not because it was true, she’d begun accepting that months ago, but because she relied on him, not because she had to, Jack didn’t agree with that even if sometimes she still did, but because a part of her wanted to, a part of her had learned to trust that, even if right now that felt more like a liability than it should.


End file.
